How Blockchain Is Going to Reshape Cybersecurity
The cost of cybercrime was estimated to reach $600 billion in 2018. This is 20% more than in 2014. These ever-increasing costs associated with cybercrimes force both businesses and regular consumers to practice new methods of preventing cyber attacks. Blockchain is on track with advanced cybersecurity.
The discipline of cybersecurity covers the protection of hardware, software, and electronic data from malicious code injections through the network. This post will look at three of the most widespread types of attack, and how blockchain can help to fight them.
Direct-Access Attacks
Briefly about This Type
Hackers can access a particular piece of software or an entire system directly. It can be done, for instance, through unauthorized software such as worms or keyloggers.
What’s There to Prevent It
Among the most popular methods to avoid direct-access attacks, there are intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems (IDS/IPS), antivirus software, and firewalls.
The Blockchain Remedy
The key characteristic of blockchain in terms of preventing direct-access attacks is its decentralization. Blockchain-secured data is encrypted and distributed between the nodes within a single blockchain. It means that to hack blockchain-based software, it’s necessary to wipe clean all of its nodes simultaneously, let alone breaking the encryption.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks
Briefly about This Type
A DDoS attack assumes using a big number of unique IP addresses to penetrate a system. Under such an attack, the system cannot deal with all the incoming traffic, including the difficulty with distinguishing legitimate users. DDoS perpetrators can forge IP addresses, which makes averting a DDoS attack even more complicated.
What’s There to Prevent It
There are two ways to handle DDoS attacks. First, you can switch to cloud-based web servers, which can sustain as much traffic as required. If you can’t, it’s better to call a DDoS mitigation company.
The Blockchain Remedy
Since blockchain data is decentralized, a DDoS attack would need to target simultaneously all the nodes in a chain. The costs of arranging such an attack would be pretty high.
Rate limiting is another option. Let’s take the genEOS blockchain ecosystem as an example. The number of tokens distributed between its blockchain participants determines how many simultaneous transactions they are allowed to do. In case of surpassing this amount, the platform will start charging a small fee. This alone should discourage DDoS organizers.
By the way, the same DDoS protection system is extended to all decentralized applications (Dapps) built on top of genEOS.
Spoofing
Briefly about This Type
Spoofing is the act of forging an identity to gain an illegitimate advantage over a system. For instance, if someone wants to gain confidential business information stored in some database, this person can disguise as a valid entity by fabricating the credentials.
What’s There to Prevent It
Talking about standard authentication approaches like using credentials, a public key infrastructure (PKI) can help to overcome associated vulnerabilities.
How does a PKI work? Imagine a person who’d like to keep her information secret. To do this, she would need to generate two keys, one public and the other one private.
With a public key, anyone can encrypt the data consigned to this person, but only this person can decrypt this data with his or her private key. To be sure that this particular public key has been issued to encrypt data exactly for this person in question, a certificate authority (CA) needs to confirm the validity of the key by means of a digital certificate. However, a failure at the CA level can cause a big data security risk.
The Blockchain Remedy
Security of Dapps is based on the fact that blockchain acts as an immutable digital ledger. It can replace CAs or any other third parties that are to issue and distribute digital certificates.
For instance, in the case of genEOS, the environment guarantees the witnessing of any transaction by 21 participants. This eliminates chances of a blockchain-based PKI failing.
Blockchain for Ultimate Security
Blockchain can reinforce cybersecurity methods. Being decentralized, blockchain can mitigate DDoS and direct-access attacks. As a public ledger, it can replace third parties required for a PKI to make it transparent and eliminate single points-of-failure.
