While still controversial in terms of mainstream use, the study, research, and development of all things blockchain has been moving ahead full steam. Interestingly, while distributed ledger technology (DLT) is intrinsically perceived to be more secure than traditional client-server and n-tiered architectures, the desire to study these aspects in detail have been rising as commercial use cases rise beyond cryptocurrency. This paper, a survey of existing blockchain security and privacy attributes and attacks, while focused on Bitcoin-like systems, is a good reference for other DLT applications.

The authors also propose additional security and privacy properties that developers of new DLT applications may desire. Primarily, due to a lack of non-cryptocurrency blockchain-based applications, the authors stick to comparing Bitcoin-like systems to explain the threats, techniques, and procedures for the security and privacy attributes identified. However, they do add a high-level analysis of proposed attributes for current DLT applications based on cryptographic components like “consensus algorithms, hash chained storage, mixing protocols, anonymous signatures, [and] non-interactive zero-knowledge proof[s].”

What sets this paper apart from many other security and privacy analyses of blockchain systems is its focus on individual properties rather than the application as a whole. In assuming familiarity with cryptocurrency applications based on DLT, the authors succeed in furthering the discussion and research on advanced security and privacy aspirations for semi-private distributed systems. As a supplementary reference, the paper also includes basic descriptions of blockchain concepts, inherent security attributes in blockchain systems, and consensus algorithms.