Blockchain is the new “buzz” word that has attracted the attention of industries and businesses. It is an innovative technology that provides information exchange in an efficient and transparent manner. It has a wide range of application varying from cryptocurrency, healthcare, risk management, education, financial services, internet of things (IoT), border security to public services. However, security issues and threats of this novel technology is also an important topic. In this chapter, the authors provide a comprehensive study of applications, challenges, and issues and how to combat them in the blockchain. Major areas of concern are security, scalability, cryptocurrency's malicious attacks, etc.
TopIntroduction
The escalating popularity of digital crypto-currency has led to the foundation of blockchain (Staff, 2016). The blockchain is a distributed public ledger that maintains transaction between two parties in a permanent and verifiable way (Iansiti & Lakhani, 2017). It is a bedrock mechanics for the successful implementation of virtual currency i.e. Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008). Bitcoin is awarded as the best-performing currency for the year 2015 and 2016 (Desjardins, 2017) and it has total bitcoin (sum of all bitcoins) of 17,523,954 BTC with its monetary value of $ 59,561,046,878 USD by bitinfochart1 in February, 2019. Bitcoin, along with its underlying technology, has exhibited promising operational prospects which have attracted the interest of industries and academia. This technology can be put forward into many domains like finance (Eyal, 2017; Guo & Liang, 2016), healthcare (Ekblaw, Azaria, Halamka, & Lippman, 2016; Yue, Wang, Jin, Li, & Jiang, 2016), internet of things (Huh, Cho, & Kim, 2017), software engineering (Xu et al., 2016; Nordström, 2015), infrastructure (Shrier, Wu, & Pentland, 2016) and many more.
Financial institutions, BAWT and GAFA companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Weibo, Tencent, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, respectively) or some government bodies tend to implement this distributed technology for their operation. Facebook has shown keen interest in blockchain and has a devoted team for blockchain. It may this disruptive technology to issue its own crypto-currency or have faster payment channel or for storing the user details and many more2. Microsoft, has created ‘Coco’ blockchain construct to work in big business framework to render solutions to institutional clients3. Google is working in blockchain related to cloud business to make data more secure4. IBM has Fabric blockchain-project5 to give support for the implementation of blockchain solutions.
Despite all these promising potentials, it has encountered many security attacks, data tampering, and privacy breach. Due to network interconnectivity, more than 500,000 new malware and spyware variants surface on an ordinary level. Majority of these are polymorphic malware which is cryptic to penetrate the latest detection program in the market (Gallagher, 2014). Cryptocurrency hacks have become more prominent and valuable with more than $10M+ hacks happening regularly after mid-2016 when crypto-market started taking off (Raul, 2018). Recently, there was a crypto hack on Japanese exchange, Coincheck Inc., (BBC News, 2018), stating a $500M digital tokens were stolen. This was regarded as world biggest theft ever in digital currency. Recently, the government of India has taken the measures to ban bitcoins due to tax issues and criminal activity6. Such an incidence throws light on the need for a safer and secure system.
The aim of this chapter is to summaries the implementation of blockchain and similar digital distributed ledger technology in different businesses beyond its application in finance. We are not proposing any framework or new implementation of this technology. The overall journey is divided into the section where we focus on blockchain and its key features in section 2. Section 3 depicts the application and opportunities of this technology in domain specific areas. In section 4, states the issues, challenges, and solutions. Lastly, conclusion and future work is included in section 5.