Blockchain-based Application Security Risks: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews security risks in blockchain-based applications, highlighting both mitigated and persistent vulnerabilities, and provides a preliminary checklist for developers and researchers.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive literature review of security risks in blockchain applications, identifying domains affected and proposing a risk checklist.

Findings

Identifies security risks mitigated by blockchain technology.

Highlights vulnerabilities still present in blockchain applications.

Provides a preliminary security risk checklist for implementation.

Abstract

Although the blockchain-based applications are considered to be less vulnerable due to the nature of the distributed ledger, they did not become the silver bullet with respect to securing the information against different security risks. In this paper, we present a literature review on the security risks that can be mitigated by introducing the blockchain technology, and on the security risks that are identified in the blockchain-based applications. In addition, we highlight the application and technology domains where these security risks are observed. The results of this study could be seen as a preliminary checklist of security risks when implementing blockchain-based applications.