Bitcoin and Blockchain Security

There is a lot of buzz about Bitcoin and Blockchain lately, our expert authors will help to answer some imperative questions about the security involved in this new digital asset and ledger. This comprehensive new resource presents a thorough overview and analysis of the security and privacy provisions of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain clients.

This book goes beyond the analysis of reported vulnerabilities of Bitcoin, evaluating a number of countermeasures to deter threats on the system. Readers are given concrete solutions and recommendations on the best practices to use when relying on Bitcoin as a payment method. This resource provides a clear explanation of assumptions governing the security of Bitcoin, including the scalability measures adopted in Bitcoin, privacy for clients, and the proper means of securing Bitcoin wallets.

Readers learn how the security and privacy provisions of other blockchain technologies compare to Bitcoin and the security lessons learned after extensive research of Bitcoin since the inception of the currency.

- Background on Digital Payments
- Security of Transactions in Bitcoin
- Privacy in Bitcoin
- Lightweight Clients and Simple Payment Verification in Bitcoin
- The limits of De-centralization of Bitcoin
- Applications and Extensions of Bitcoin
- Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

Ghassan O. Karame is a senior researcher in the security group at NEC Laboratories Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and M.Sc. in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University.

Elli Androulaki is a postdoctoral researcher of the Storage Systems group at IBM Research Laboratory, Zurich. She received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. from Columbia University, New York and her B.S. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering School at National Technical University of Athens.