Blockchain technology is the underlying technology of bitcoin, has come out with several promising potential applications. In a little less than a decade, many companies have made investments in the BT (Blockchain Technology) and raised over US$3.1 billion in total venture capital. According to research, the cryptocurrency market introduced by Blockchain technology is projected to skyrocket a total market of capitalization of more than US$143 billion.
There are growing interests in all industrial sectors to utilize blockchain technology for various purposes such as financial transactions, secure contracts, sharing health information, etc. Initially, it was developed to promote Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but now its future is not clear. At the same time, BT is trying to luring governments, academic institutes, and public sectors with its proficiency.
What Blockchain Technology is Up To
Blockchain is a computer algorithm or a kind of distributed ledger technology where every transaction is recorded with a hash, an immutable cryptographic signature. Each block in the chain involves a number of transactions. Every time a record of the transaction is added to the participant’s ledger to confirm the occurrence of new transactions on the blockchain.
The technology promises to facilitate business transactions between untrusted entities. Its features support authentication, verification, identification, transparency, integrity, immutability, smart ledgers, and decentralized smart contracts. It provides replicated and chronologically linked digital ledgers in a decentralized database and allows sharing transactions in a vast network of unreliable entities. The independent verification guarantee of BT eliminates the need to be dependent on a central authority.
BT can provide better security attributes for systems that are shared among varied entities. It encourages to apply immutability against supervision and abuse even if there is a malicious insider. Undoubtedly, BT is cutting-edge technology and evolved in the market with many promises. Yet, its robustness is the most critical concern, trying to greying of hair. There have been many cyber security vulnerabilities have been discovered in blockchain implementations. Who forgets the recent dusting attack? The incident happened on the Litecoin blockchain network in 2019, where attackers exhibited their intelligence by breaking the anonymity and privacy of BTC (Bitcoin) users and sent very tiny dust coins to the personal wallets of the potential victims. The attackers performed a combined analysis of addresses to track down the transactional activity of these wallets and to identify the owner of every wallet.
Moreover, several reports and articles have been published about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and cyberattacks in Blockchain Technology. Due to vulnerabilities in the blockchain, financial losses are possible in smart contracts. For example, 8833 smart contracts are unprotected, and their total balance is 3,068,654 million Ethers, which is roughly worth US$30 million.
Ethereum Smart Contracts – Common Vulnerability Types
· Denial of Service
· Re-Entrancy
· Timestamp Dependence
· Deadlock
· Transaction-Oriented Dependence
Denial of Service
The recipient contract can throw an exception and block the execution of the function when there is a high-level function call made to another contract.
Re-Entrancy
On Ethereum, the execution of the caller gets blocked when a contract calls a function in another contract, and it doesn’t get unblocked until the call returns. The malicious attacks can easy to commit at this point. Re-entrancy weakness can be exploited in the DAO attack. During withdrawal transactions of cryptocurrency, a malicious Calle may be able to execute another withdrawal before allowing the caller to reduce its balance.
Timestamp Dependence
In Ethereum, it is possible for a malicious miner to change the clock that is used to implement smart contracts within minutes. A miner can select the timestamp of a block, and contracts whose accuracy relies on the correctness of the clock may expose vulnerabilities.
Deadlock
Sometimes the contract ends up in a deadlock state where no one can transfer or withdraw its currency. Thus, currency can be lost from the stored contracts, and you may experience a severe loss.
Transaction-Ordering Dependence
If two or more customers invoke functions in a similar contract, it can be impossible to predict the order in which their calls are executed. For instance, in an online marketplace, one user can make modifications in the price section of items before the execution of another recipient's purchasing transaction.
Therefore, using security testing services is necessary to find and patch contract vulnerabilities before deployment. One can use security analyzer tools Such as Securify, Vandal, MAIAN, Ethir, and Oyente to resolve Ethereum and Smart Contracts' issues.
Importance of Security Testing in Blockchain
Security testing is a kind of software testing that helps uncover threats, vulnerabilities, and risks in a software application and ensures to protect malicious attacks against intruders. Security testing aims to check all possible weaknesses and loopholes of the blockchain-based software application, resulting in a loss of revenue and information, and indeed down the reputation of the organization.
To make the blockchain applications completely secure, there is a dire need to conduct different types of security testing such as vulnerability scanning, security scanning, pen testing, ethical hacking, risk assessment, security auditing, and posture assessment. There must be a robust approach follow to confirm the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of the entire blockchain application.
Author Bio: Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President
Strategies at BugRaptors who oversees
all the quality control and assurance strategies for client engagements. She
loves to share her knowledge with others through blogging. Being a voracious
bloggers, she published countless informative blogs to educate audience about
automation and manual testing.