LedgerGuard: Improving Blockchain Ledger Dependability
This addresses ledger integrity issues for blockchain platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing validation mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of blockchain ledger corruption due to software, hardware, or malicious failures by proposing LedgerGuard, a tool that detects and recovers corrupted blocks through network synchronization, with an experimental implementation on Hyperledger Fabric.
The rise of crypto-currencies has spawned great interest in their underlying technology, namely, Blockchain. The central component in a Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger. A ledger comprises series of blocks, which in turns contains a series of transactions. An identical copy of the ledger is stored on all nodes in a blockchain network. Maintaining ledger integrity and security is one of the crucial design aspects of any blockchain platform. Thus, there are typically built-in validation mechanisms leveraging cryptography to ensure the validity of incoming blocks before committing them into the ledger. However, a blockchain node may run over an extended period of time, during which the blocks on the disk can may become corrupted due to software or hardware failures, or due to malicious activity. This paper proposes LedgerGuard, a tool to maintain ledger integrity by detecting corrupted blocks and recovering these blocks by synchronizing with rest of the network. The experimental implementation of LedgerGuard is based on Hyperledger Fabric, which is a popular open source permissioned blockchain platform.