The information in any real-time application is needed to be digitalized across the world. Since digitalization of data happens, there comes the role of privacy. Blockchain could address the security challenge that happens in the any real sector. There are a few more challenges that prevail in the industry such as integrity in data, traceability of stored records, and interoperability among organizations that share information. This chapter says what blockchain is and applications in which blockchain technology could solve the existing challenges where they lack security, privacy, integrity, and interoperability.
TopIntroduction
In the last few years, the major concern is about moving to the online world safely. The unauthorized access of data, program among the network is quite common. In spite of using various conventional ways of protecting online data, still, hackers are smart to intrude into the network. Figure 1 shows the traditional way of protecting online data against the cyber-attacks.
Figure 1. Traditional Techniques used against the cyber threat
By looking at some of the recent cyber-attacks it seems like things get only worse day by day around the world.
TopBackground
Massive Cyber Security Attacks Of 2018
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A massive DOS attack with 1.35TB per second of traffic hitting the popular website ‘Github’.
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On a single day, 3 billion yahoo email address got affected.
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150 million people personal information was hacked by gaining access to certain files in a U.S. website application.
A very high level of dependency on the internet platform only leads to these types of cyber-attacks. Centralization of control, lack of integrity information that we are getting, the trust of quality in data is also some of the problems that need to be addressed.
So to answer all these problems an impenetrable technology called “BLOCKCHAIN” can be used to protect personal information data from attacks and improve cybersecurity across platforms.
The reason for the existing cyber-attacks is because they are partially decentralized. Implementing blockchain technology would fully decentralized DNS; the contents in the chain are stored in a large number of nodes making it nearly impossible for hackers to attack.
This chapter is an overview of how blockchain works and how can it is used to improve the online security of any application.
Blockchain Technology
A blockchain is a constantly growing ledger that keeps a permanent record of all the transactions that have taken place, in a secure, chronological and immutable way. (Nakamoto, 2008).
A blockchain is a ledger where it keeps track of all the transaction made permanently. That means once a transaction is made you can’t pull it out. It is recorded permanently (Nakamoto, 2008).
Every transaction is recorded in a ledger one after other i.e.) chronological order.
Figure 2. Creation of a blockchain network
As shown in figure 2 a group of the block together forms a blockchain network. Each block contains basically three values,
Figure 3. How a genesis block looks
Figure 3 shows that always the Previous Block hash value in a genesis block is all zero’s since that is the very first block created. The Hash values for each block are generated using the hash function. The hashing technique is explained briefly in the upcoming section.
TopHow To Update A Data In A Block?
In a blockchain, if a node needs to update a particular piece of data in a transaction to a block, it has to add a new transaction on top of the previous transaction on the block. Since even a small dot or comma gets added to the data the hash value gets changed. Using this technique, it is easy for the system to detect which block contains incorrect or false data.