LedgerGuard: Improving Blockchain Ledger Dependability

TL;DR

LedgerGuard is a tool designed to detect and recover corrupted blocks in blockchain ledgers, enhancing the dependability of blockchain systems like Hyperledger Fabric through synchronization with the network.

Contribution

The paper introduces LedgerGuard, a novel tool that maintains ledger integrity by detecting corruption and recovering blocks in blockchain networks.

Findings

LedgerGuard effectively detects corrupted blocks in Hyperledger Fabric.

LedgerGuard successfully recovers corrupted blocks by synchronizing with the network.

Experimental results show improved ledger dependability with LedgerGuard.

Abstract

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.