An Analysis of Blockchain Technology: A Security and Privacy Perspective

Abstract

Blockchain has evolved in many ways and adopted by various communities both technical and commercial. It has many applications out of which smart contracts are one of the powerful applications. Smart contracts are terms of agreements between concerned parties encoded in computer code and stored on a blockchain. Smart contract execution happens automatically if the conditions of the agreements are satisfied. It eliminates the need of third parties and automates the process thereby enabling stakeholders to transact with each other. The features of blockchain like immutability, decentralization and security are used in these contracts to make themselves smart. HBasechainDB is a tamper-proof Big Data store which is a scalable blockchain framework. It provides decentralization and unchangeability to HBase database store that uses pipelining to gain performance just like BigchainDB. As it is built on Hadoop ecosystem it gets the big data processing property. HBasechainDB has been a work in progress at the HPCD Lab, DMACS-SSSIHL, the current version has demonstrated good performance with high scalability but has no smart contract feature to make it a robust, flexible and versatile platform. We propose an enhanced version of HBasechainDB that provides the functionalities of deploying Smart Contract. The re-architected version of HBasechainDB also shows better performance than the previous version. It has 3x better performance than that of Ethereum and 0.4x of Hyperledger Fabric. BigchainDB is another blockchain network that is designed for high throughput transaction processing. It is shown that HBasechainDB per forms better than BigchainDB in terms of throughput in processing of transactions.