Bitcoin and Blockchain Security

Bitcoin and Blockchain Security goes beyond the analysis of reported vulnerabilities of Bitcoin, evaluating a number of countermeasures to deter threats on the system. Readers are given concrete solutions and recommendations on the best practices to use when relying on Bitcoin as a payment method.

Introduction:

In Bitcoin and Blockchain Security, we overview, detail, and analyze the security and privacy provisions of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain—effectively capturing 8 years of thorough research on these subjects. Our contributions go beyond the mere analysis of reported vulnerabilities of Bitcoin; namely, we describe and evaluate a number of countermeasures to deter threats on the system—some of which have already been incorporated in the system.

Recall that Bitcoin has been forked multiple times in order to fine-tune the consensus (i.e., the block generation time and the hash function), and the network parameters (e.g., the size of blocks). For instance, Litecoin and Dogecoin—Bitcoin’s most prominent forks—reduce the block generation time from 10 to 2.5 and 1 minute, respectively. As such, the results reported in this book are not only restricted to Bitcoin, but apply equally to a number of altcoins that are basically clones/forks of the Bitcoin source code. As far as we are aware, this book emerges as the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the security and privacy provisions of Bitcoin and of its related clones/variants.

Bitcoin and Blockchain Security takes a holistic approach in covering the security and privacy throughout the entire life cycle of coin expenditure in the system—effectively covering the security of transaction confirmation in the system, the fairness of the mining process, the privacy of users, the security of Bitcoin wallets, network attacks, the security and privacy of lightweight clients, among others.

Contents:

• Background on Digital Payments
• Bitcoin Protocol Specification
• Security of Transactions in Bitcoin
• Privacy in Bitcoin
• Security and Privacy of Lightweight Clients
• Bitcoin’s Ecosystem
• Applications and Extensions of Bitcoin
• Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin
• Concluding Remarks

Bitcoin and Blockchain Security By Ghassan Karame, Elli Androulaki PDF