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Blockchain

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Crypto-Asset Exchange Security Guidelines

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Blockchain

Blockchain improves cloud security by improving data security, specifically the confidentiality (privacy), integrity and availability of data. Depending on the Blockchain solution and technology used you can set the needed security levels for the system as a whole but down to the individual record level as needed. Because cloud computing often involves the outsourcing of trust to a provider (that runs your IT infrastructure, stores your data, etc.) new ways of ensuring data security are needed. Blockchain technologies offer a high degree of customization. You can build fully private, public, and mixed blockchains. You can choose the consensus mechanisms for transaction processing and dispute resolution as well as the governance model so that they fit your needs and regulatory requirements. Additional capabilities such as Smart Contracts and Smart Assets can be added allowing for a rich ecosystem to be developed to support the business needs now, and in future.

What are the security issues with blockchain?

Like any complex technology, most Blockchain/DLT systems suffer from new security issues. The CSA currently has a draft listing of almost 200 weaknesses and vulnerabilities in Blockchain technology, many of which are not fully understood or documented at this time. As part of our work we are attempting to classify and publicize these weaknesses and allow other industry efforts (such as CWE, https://cwe.mitre.org) to leverage them.

CSA created a framework for distributed ledger technologies used by financial services. You can learn more about this project and read the latest papers released for this initiative in this blog.

Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Internet of Things Financial Services

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Press Mention	Source	Date
Luxembourg regulator CSSF issues checklist for blockchain risks	Ledger Insights	January 25, 2022
Cloud Security Alliance Publishes Report on Blockchain Risk, Security Considerations	Crowdfund Insider	February 16, 2022
New Cloud Security Alliance Report Highlights Factors to Consider When Designing Blockchain Solutions That Operate Within Critical Sectors	Crypto Reporter	February 16, 2022
Cloud Security Alliance Provides C-level Executives With Best Practices for Deploying Smart Contracts Within an Organization	IT Security News	May 20, 2022
A Push to Make Smart Contracts Even Smarter	RT Insights	June 09, 2022

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Cloud Security Research for Blockchain

CSA Research crowd-sources the knowledge and expertise of security experts and helps address the challenges and needs they’ve experienced, or seen others experience, within the cybersecurity field. Each publication is vendor-neutral and follows the peer review process outlined in the CSA Research Lifecycle. We recommend getting started by reading the following documents.

Crypto-Asset Exchange Security Guidelines

Experts have identified crypto-asset exchanges as a major pain point of crypto security. Exchanges are platforms that mediate crypto-asset transactions between entities. There are several types of attacks that are successful against exchanges. In this document, we give an overview of these attacks, describe an exchange security reference architecture, and then provide a detailed list of crypto-asset exchange security best practices, administrative controls, and physical controls.

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Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 Architecture Security Report

Blockchain technology is being rapidly adopted by enterprises to bring traceability and transparency to external business workflows.Considering that many of these external business workflows involve transactions and custody of value in the form of digital assets or other high-value data, cybersecurity certainly takes center stage. In this paper we identified Fabric 2.0’s architectural risks to Cybersecurity attributes (Privacy, Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) while being implemented as a permissioned blockchain enterprise network for a trade finance business use case in a cloud-based environment.

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Using Blockchain Technology to Secure the Internet of Things

This paper describes a high-level overview of blockchain technology and outlines a set of architectural patterns that enable blockchain to be used as a technology to secure IoT capabilities. Specific use-case examples of blockchain for IoT security are also explored, although technical implementation of those use cases will vary across companies. Access this report

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Distributed Ledger Technologies Security Framework

Distributed ledger technologies introduce a multitude of value propositions for the financial services industry. The pace of innovation is aggressively picking up in use cases pertaining to finance such as digital assets, tokenization and cryptocurrency. However, the security measures are significantly inadequate to support innovation. There is a growing need for increased vigilance and an industry-standard security framework. To address this gap DTCC & CSA have launched an initiative to address the needs of the industrywide DLT Security Framework.

The goal of this framework will be a series of papers addressing specific topics related to blockchain. This series of papers is now available.

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