Blockchain Implementation Quality Challenges: A Literature Review

Blockchain is a public digital and distributed database solution providing decentralized management of transaction data. Since the introduction of Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which was the rst implementation of the Blockchain technology in 2008, the interest in Blockchain technology has been constantly increasing. Blockchain is not applicable only in nancial transaction systems but it is transforming our society from the way we use our cars, smartphones, healthcare, vote, and even personal identi cation. As such when we discuss the Blockchain implementation we are really discussing three di erent things: Blockchain ledger, Blockchain network and clients. Modern Blockchain implementations have to adapt to some technical challenges and limitations required for Blockchain technology. For example, security, privacy, throughput, size and bandwidth, performance, usability, data integrity and scalability are just some of the attributes required for high quality Blockchain implementation. In this paper, we aim to analyze the current quality issues in the Blockchain implementation and to identify the Blockchain quality attributes. A literature review is conducted to investigate the current quality requirements for Blockchain implementation. Findings show that the research on quality requirements for Blockchain implementation is still in its early stage. The conclusions of this study could be used for further analysis of the quality attributes required for the Blockchain implementations and improvement of the quality of the Blockchain systems.

[1]  Melanie Swan,et al.  Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy , 2015 .

[2]  Goutam Paul,et al.  Towards a More Democratic Mining in Bitcoins , 2014, ICISS.

[3]  Marko Vukolic,et al.  The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication , 2015, iNetSeC.

[4]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications , 2015, EUROCRYPT.

[5]  Giuseppe Ateniese,et al.  Certified Bitcoins , 2014, ACNS.

[6]  Xin Wang,et al.  Human Resource Information Management Model based on Blockchain Technology , 2017, 2017 IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE).

[7]  Fergal Reid,et al.  An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System , 2011, PASSAT 2011.

[8]  Patrick D. McDaniel,et al.  An Analysis of Anonymity in Bitcoin Using P2P Network Traffic , 2014, Financial Cryptography.

[9]  Andrea Pinna,et al.  Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering: Challenges and New Directions , 2017, 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C).

[10]  Tyler Moore,et al.  There's No Free Lunch, Even Using Bitcoin: Tracking the Popularity and Profits of Virtual Currency Scams , 2015, Financial Cryptography.

[11]  Sooyong Park,et al.  Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review , 2016, PloS one.

[12]  Marc Pilkington,et al.  Blockchain Technology: Principles and Applications , 2015 .

[13]  The Lancet Psychiatry The most wonderful time of the year. , 2018, Lancet psychiatry.

[14]  Jae-Kwang Lee,et al.  The Analysis and Countermeasures on Security Breach of Bitcoin , 2014, ICCSA.

[15]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  A Taxonomy of Blockchain-Based Systems for Architecture Design , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA).

[16]  Christian Decker,et al.  BlueWallet: The Secure Bitcoin Wallet , 2014, STM.

[17]  Arvind Sundarraman ASSURING SUCCESS IN BLOCKCHAIN IMPLEMENTATIONS BY ENGINEERING QUALITY IN VALIDATION , 2018 .

[18]  Ghassan O. Karame,et al.  Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin , 2013, Financial Cryptography.

[19]  Roman Beck,et al.  Blockchain - the Gateway to Trust-Free Cryptographic Transactions , 2016, ECIS.

[20]  Christopher Mann,et al.  Two-factor authentication for the Bitcoin protocol , 2016, International Journal of Information Security.

[21]  H. Kakavand,et al.  The Blockchain Revolution: An Analysis of Regulation and Technology Related to Distributed Ledger Technologies , 2017 .

[22]  M. Atzori Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: Is the State Still Necessary? , 2017 .

[23]  Caitie McCaffrey,et al.  The verification of a distributed system , 2016, Commun. ACM.

[24]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  The Blockchain as a Software Connector , 2016, 2016 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA).

[25]  Michael Naehrig,et al.  Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Practice , 2014, Financial Cryptography.

[26]  Cristina Pérez-Solà,et al.  Privacy in Bitcoin Transactions: New Challenges from Blockchain Scalability Solutions , 2016, MDAI.

[27]  Christian Decker,et al.  Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox , 2014, ESORICS.