A Survey on Blockchain Technology Evolution Architecture and Security

SPECIAL SECTION ON INTELLIGENT BIG DATA
ANALYTICS FOR INTERNET OF THINGS, SERVICES AND PEOPLE
Received March 2, 2021, accepted March 19, 2021, date of publication April 13, 2021, date of current version April 28, 2021.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3072849
A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution,

Architecture and Security
MUHAMMAD NASIR MUMTAZ BHUTTA 1 , AMIR A. KHWAJA1 ,
ADNAN NADEEM 2 , (Member, IEEE), HAFIZ FAROOQ AHMAD3 ,
MUHAMMAD KHURRAM KHAN 4 , (Senior Member, IEEE), MOATAZ A. HANIF5 ,
HOUBING SONG 5 , (Senior Member, IEEE), MAJED ALSHAMARI1 ,
AND YUE CAO 6 , (Member, IEEE)
1 Information Systems Department, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (CCSIT), King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia
2 Faculty of Computer and Information System, Islamic University of Madinah, Medina 42351, Saudi Arabia
3 Computer Science Department, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (CCSIT), King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia
4 Center of Excellence in Information Assurance, King Saud University, Riyadh 12372, Saudi Arabia
5 Security and Optimization for Networked Globe Laboratory (SONG lab), Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, AZ 86301, USA
6 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Corresponding authors: Muhammad Nasir Mumtaz Bhutta ([email protected]) and Muhammad Khurram Khan
([email protected])
This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research (DSR), King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia, under Grant 186218.
ABSTRACT Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that is making a great impact on modern society due
to its transparency, decentralization, and security properties. Blockchain gained considerable attention due to
its very first application of Cryptocurrencies e.g., Bitcoin. In the near future, Blockchain technology is deter-
mined to transform the way we live, interact, and perform businesses. Recently, academics, industrialists,
and researchers are aggressively investigating different aspects of Blockchain as an emerging technology.
Unlike other Blockchain surveys focusing on either its applications, challenges, characteristics, or security,
we present a comprehensive survey of Blockchain technology’s evolution, architecture, development frame-
works, and security issues. We also present a comparative analysis of frameworks, classification of consensus
algorithms, and analysis of security risks & cryptographic primitives that have been used in the Blockchain
so far. Finally, this paper elaborates on key future directions, novel use cases and open research challenges,
which could be explored by researchers to make further advances in this field.
INDEX TERMS Evolution of blockchain, blockchain architecture, smart contracts, blockchain applications,
development frameworks, blockchain security.
I. INTRODUCTION In a layman term, Blockchain is defined as the chain of

The concept of secured chain of blocks is not a new idea. digital blocks connected and associated with each other as
It was presented by Stuart Haber et al. in 1991 as a means to an open distributed ledger. Initially, it was used to store only
digitally timestamp electronic documents to protect against transactions of digital currencies, but later it started to use in
tempering [2]–[4]. However, it gained popularity in the recent other applications beyond currency and payments [7].
years when used in Blockchain technology to store transac- There are also different types of Blockchains based on
tions of a crypto currency called ‘‘Bitcoin’’ [1]. their usage and distinct attributes: 1) Public blockchains
The Blockchain 1.0 technology is associated with Cryp- 2) Private blockchains and 3) Consortium blockchains. Public
tocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses Blockchain as blockchains are truly decentralized and allow anyone to join
a way to solve the long-existing problems of double spending the network and engage in managing them. While in private
of digital cash and processing of digital transactions in a blockchains only invited people from a single organization
decentralized way without the need of any trusted third party. can join the network and manage them. The consortium
Blockchain also called ‘‘Federated Blockchain’’ is between
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and public and private Blockchain, in terms of permissions and
approving it for publication was Jenny Mahoney. management. Invited people from multiple organizations are
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
61048 VOLUME 9, 2021
M. N. M. Bhutta et al.: Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security
TABLE 1. Comparison of Recent Blockchain Survey Articles with this SURVEY PAPER.
allowed to join this Blockchain. These different types of Some articles have superficially discussed smart con-
blockchains are described in detail later in this paper. The tracts [8], [13] and Blockchain applications architecture [9],
main strength of the applicability of Blockchain to such wide [12], [22]. Some survey articles have also presented different
domains is in its characteristics or features like decentral- Blockchain applications [26], [151] while major review focus
ization, pseudonymity, transparency, democracy, immutabil- has been on Blockchain applications with other technolo-
ity, auditability, fault tolerance and security. The success of gies like IoT and smart cities [8], [9], [14], [21]– [25]. The
Blockchain technology also heavily depends on the availabil- Blockchain security is also reviewed in some survey articles
ity of the application development frameworks (ADFs). including [11], [15], [16], [29], [152].
As one of the present technologies that have managed to However, on the other side, the contribution of this survey
attain huge fame, there are still numerous open issues in is as follows: preliminary technical concepts and character-
security and privacy associated with Blockchain innovation. istics and issues are discussed to enable the reader to under-
stand the Blockchain concepts effectively. The architecture of
A. CONTRIBUTION OF THIS SURVEY AND COMPARISON all versions of Blockchain including cryptocurrencies, smart
WITH RELATED SURVEY ARTICLES contracts, and generic applications, is reviewed in detail to
This paper mainly contributes to the existing knowledge guarantee the flow of understanding in a holistic manner.
in two broad ways. First, the Blockchain evolution and The design and working of components of all versions of
architecture in cryptocurrencies is reviewed as well as archi- Blockchain are presented with a clear distinction for different
tecture and research developments pertaining to Smart Con- versions. The research related to consensus algorithms, devel-
tracts (Blockchain 2.0) and Blockchain-based applications opment frameworks, and security is then reviewed in detail in
or ecosystems in general (Blockchain 3.0) beyond financial this paper.
transactions. Second, we also present a comparative analysis Ultimately the goal of this survey is to acquaint the
of existing Blockchain frameworks, consensus algorithms, researchers with inner technical details and research advance-
security risks, and future perspectives in this single paper. ments of all versions of Blockchain technology. The similari-
Recently, many survey articles have attempted to review ties and differences of research areas addressed in this survey
the Blockchain technology in varying degrees of depth with in comparison to previous survey articles are highlighted
a specific scope. However, based on the literature review, in Table 1.
no paper has addressed detailed aspects of various versions of
Blockchain technology, review of consensus algorithms, and B. ORGANIZATION OF THE SURVEY
security issues together in a single survey paper. This lack The organization of the survey is as follows and shown
of comprehensiveness motivates us to contribute through this in Figure 1: Section 2 discusses the background concepts as
survey of Blockchain evolutions, architecture, consensus, and preliminaries for better understanding of core of this paper
security in-depth in this paper. followed by characteristics of Blockchain. This section also
Many survey articles are written in the recent past with only highlights the challenges and issues of Blockchain technol-
a focus on cryptocurrencies [8], [9], [11]– [21], [23]– [28], ogy. Section 3 presents evolution and types of Blockchain
or only consensus algorithms [20], [26], [157], [170]. technology in detail. In section 4, we review existing
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b: CRYPTOGRAPHY
The mathematical art of making communication secure is
cryptography. It is commonly used in most modern security
protocols [2]. In cryptography, a mathematical value called
‘key’ plays a central role. There are two types of modern
cryptography:
• Symmetric key cryptography in which same key is used
by sender and receiver for cryptographic operations.
• Asymmetric key cryptography in which, each commu-
nicating party has two different keys called public and
private keys used for different cryptographic operations
in different ways [2].
There are multiple operations performed in cryptography
for provision of different security services like confiden-
tiality (keeping information private to communicating par-
ties), integrity (ensuring information remains in its original
form), authentication (validating the identity of source) and
non-repudiation (ensuring integrity and authentication) [2].
c: ENCRYPTION/DECRYPTION
Encryption is used for provision of confidentiality of secu-
rity service. Encryption is a process to encode the plaintext
(intelligible data) into cipher text (unintelligible data or un-
understandable data). The decryption is the reverse process to
FIGURE 1. Structure and Contribution of this survey.
convert cipher text into plaintext. Encryption and decryption
process can be implemented by using symmetric or asymmet-
ric cryptography [3].
architectures and components of Blockchain in relation to d: HASH
cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and Blockchain applica- Hash is one-way mathematical function to protect the
tions in general. The research advancements in consensus integrity of data. It works by calculating a fixed-sized unique
algorithms are highlighted separately in section 5. A detailed value called ‘‘hash value’’ for every variable input. The hash
discussion in research advancements and open research issues function is one-way, which means original data cannot be cal-
related to Blockchain security is included in Section 6. culated back from the unique output [3]. Its security strength
Section 7 describes the open research issues learned from lies on one-way characteristic, which is used to protect the
the literature review to carry out in future and finally, integrity of data [3].
Section 8 concludes the survey.
e: HASH CHAIN
II. BACKGROUND, CHARACTERISTICS AND CHALLENGES A hash chain is generated by successively applying the hash
This section first presents the basic concepts of Blockchain function on a piece of data. For example, a hash value h1 is
technology and then discusses the characteristics and issues generated by applying a hash function f (x) on data x. The h1
of technology. is input to the other hash function ‘f (h1 )’ to calculate second
hash value h2 in the chain and so on. These calculated hash
1) PRELIMINARY CONCEPTS values h1 , h2 , . . . , hn make a chain of hashes of length n.
a: PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) NETWORK Because, hash functions are irreversible so h1 cannot be com-
P2P network is a distributed network architecture to share puted from h2 and then h2 cannot be computed from h3 and
resources among participants. The participants make their so on [4]. Hash chains have many applications for protection
resources (processing power, link capacity, printers and stor- of data integrity and play a key role in Blockchain.
age capacity etc.,) available to be shared with other partic-
ipants. Each participant node (peer) in such network acts f: MERKLE TREE
in roles of both (client and server). At one time, peer A Merkle trees also called hash trees provide efficient and
(acting as client) can directly request services and/or con- secure verification of data by arranging the data and cor-
tents from other peer B (acting as server) of the network responding hash values in the form of a tree. In the tree
without any intermediate entities. Later, peer A may act as structure, every leaf node is labelled with the hash value of
a server for a content or service request from peer B acting as some data and every non-leaf node contains the hash value of
client [1]. its child nodes. Figure 2 shows an example of a Merkle tree
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computers, often referred to as nodes. These nodes form a

Blockchain network with several of these nodes working in
a P2P manner, validating access to the information without
a centralized authority [50], [70] and [12]. The Blockchain
system uses distributed system structure for recording, stor-
ing, updating, transmission, verification, maintenance, and
several other processes related to the information in the
Blockchain network [16], [71]. This decentralization charac-
teristic eliminates the need for powerful central authorities
and instead transfers control to the individual user making
the system fair and considerably more secure. Informa-
tion recording is performed, and the transactions are vali-
dated, using a set of rules and algorithms, called consensus
protocols, among the Blockchain nodes to ensure that infor-
mation is consistent and incorruptible [70] and [72]. Con-
FIGURE 2. An Example of Merkle Tree (Binary Hash Tree). sensus is achieved when enough devices agree about what
should be recorded onto a Blockchain. Chain nodes may
use a pure mathematical method (asymmetric cryptography)
in which data blocks represented as D1 and D2 are input to
to establish trust among each other without control of any
leaf nodes (hashes of D1 and D2) of Merkle Tree. From the
central authority or regulatory agency to manipulate the data
hashes h1 and h2 , another hash is calculated and is added as
unilaterally [71]. Each distributed node in this network is
the parent node of child nodes [5].
relatively independent, have equal rights and obligations, and
g: DIGITAL SIGNATURES & TIMESTAMP does not affect the entire network if there is a node level
Digital signatures are used as a proof of authorship along with corruption, guaranteeing improved reliability and robustness
the contents. The signatures are usually applied using public of the Blockchain system [71]. Due to complex consensus
key cryptography in which, a signer uses its private key to sign mechanism required to edit or manipulate multiple copies
a document and a recipient can verify the signatures using of information recorded on the Blockchain; it can be cer-
signer’s public key. Digital signatures are considered authen- tain that the information is genuine. Multiple copies of dis-
tic, unforgeable, non-reusable and non-repudiated. It means tributed information on the Blockchain also prevents the risk
that digital signature cannot be shifted for any other docu- of information being lost or destroyed due to dependency
ment/contents and one cannot deliberately claim the signature on a centralized location. Moreover, removing a central-
except the original signer and even original signer cannot ized body collecting, recording, maintaining, and, in general,
repudiate it [3], [40]. Timestamp is the time at which event unrestricted access to information, also improves privacy of
occurrence is recorded by a computer, rather than the time of users as well as eliminates misuse of the information. Finally,
event itself. Usually, it records the date and time of the day lack of reliance on a centralized body for executing and
at which event occurred and is accurate to a small fraction validating transactions can significantly reduce intermediary
of second. This timestamp’s data is recoded in a consistent costs and improve performance bottlenecks at the central
manner along with the actual data for easy comparison of two servers [71], [72].
different records to track progress over time [6].
b: TRANSPARENCY
2) BLOCKCHAIN CHARACTERISTICS Transactions on Blockchain ledger are completely transpar-
This section synthesizes key Blockchain characteristics from ent where anyone can see the details and history of any trans-
literature. In doing so, the paper highlights variation in ter- action. This level of transparency is unique to Blockchain
minology for some of these characteristics which is quite technology and provides a high level of accountability and
natural for a technology considered in its infancy. The section integrity to the information, ensuring that nothing is unduly
attempts to unify the terminologies for various characteris- altered, deceitfully added, or removed. This high level of
tics. The benefits and any possible issues related to each char- transparency is unprecedented, especially for large financial
acteristic are also discussed. In addition, current issues with systems. This level of transparency is achieved because a
the Blockchain technology are identified and key research Blockchain network has several validating peer nodes without
challenges are highlighted. a centralized authority [12] as well as the fact that the holdings
Following key characteristics have been identified for the and transactions of each public address are accessible and
Blockchain technology: open to viewing to anyone [70], resulting in traceable and
transparent transaction records. Xinyi et al. [71] used the
a: DECENTRALIZATION term openness to refer to the same concept. According to
Decentralization is perhaps the most important characteristic Xinyi et al. [71], the technical foundation of Blockchain
of the Blockchain. The Blockchain ledger exists on multiple is open source where any node can develop appropriate
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applications through an open interface to query data of d: SECURITY

Blockchain resulting in the data content and the operating Blockchain systems are inherently secure as these systems
rules of the whole system to be highly public and transparent use asymmetrical cryptography consisting of set of public
with no deception between nodes [71]. Same transparency keys visible to anyone and a set of private keys visible only
rules apply on any updates to any data in the Blockchain [16]. to the owner. These keys are used to ensure the ownership
Zheng et al. [72] and Ferrag et al. [42] used the term auditabil- of transaction as well as the un-tamperability of the trans-
ity for high visibility, easy tracking, and verification of the action [42] and [71]. Security in the Blockchain system is
transactions. In addition to significant importance of this related to the integrity, confidentiality, and authorization of
characteristic for financial auditability of large companies, transactions [70]. The distributed nature of Blockchain sys-
another key area where transparency characteristic has found tem requiring P2P consensus mechanism eliminates single
its applicability is in healthcare and clinical trials data trans- point of failure for data [70] versus that which is centrally
parency. In healthcare, Blockchain technology can be used stored and is far more vulnerable to being compromised.
by individual patients to easily view all their claims, medical
history, transactions, and overdue payments. Clinical trials e: IMMUTABILITY
data has traditionally been held from researchers, doctors, Immutability is also called un-tampereability [71], persis-
and patients, resulting in a lack of trust and credibility of tency [72], and unforgeability [50], and immutability for
findings [55]. Blockchain based methods were suggested to Blockchain [16], [42], [70] and [12] means that once data is
trace the existence of documents containing pre-specified end added to a Blockchain, it cannot be altered or tampered with.
points in clinical trials [45]. Use of smart contracts were The data blocks in a Blockchain structure are time stamped
also proposed to act as a trusted administrator to address and each block is encrypted with hash algorithm, making the
data manipulation issues common in clinical trials [55]. Sup- entry of data permanent and tamper-proof unless consensus of
ply chain management malpractices as well as obscurity majority of the nodes of the whole system [16], [71] and [12].
of product history is also shown to benefit from the trans- The transactions can be viewed by anyone anytime, however,
parency characteristic of Blockchain [30], [43] and [161]. once validated and added to the Blockchain, these transac-
Non-fraudulent public elections and increasing voters’ trust tions cannot be changed or deleted, making them irreversible
in the electoral process is also suggested to benefit from the and immutable [56]. Any change, no matter how small, will
transparency characteristic [53]. generate a different hash and can be detected right away,
making the shared ledger immutable [70]. This feature has
a great benefit for financial transactions and financial audits
c: AUTONOMY since either as a provider or recipient of data it proves that the
All transactions are usually based on trust which guarantees data has not been changed. This characteristic also generates
that the parties involved can depend on each other in ful- trust in the Blockchain system. However, immutability for
filling their commitments. Blockchain technology provides a Blockchain has its own issues and challenges and some have
system where trust is no longer an issue. This ‘‘trust free’’ now started to question the benefits of immutability [39]
system means that the Blockchain system can function in and [40].
a P2P manner without a reliable third party required to
ensure trust [70]. Some have called such systems ‘‘trust- f: TRACEABILITY
less’’ [32], [61] and [69]. However, this term has a neg- Data traceability is to track the source, destination, and
ative connotation and implies that there is trust missing sequence of various updates the data goes through in between
among the parties transacting using a Blockchain system [47]. nodes. Needed for data integrity and higher levels of trust
Blockchain uses cryptography to completely replace third on the information, data traceability also has several other
party as the governor of trust. Using the privacy and unforge- benefits of better data governance, conformity with regu-
ability of asymmetric cryptography, the Blockchain system lations, understanding impact of change, and improvement
protects message contents and verifies the sender identity, of data quality among others [46]. Blockchain technology
ensuring reliable transactions in the Blockchain system [71]. provides support for data traceability as information added
Complex distributed consensus algorithms are used by par- or updated in a Blockchain system is time stamped. Time
ticipating nodes on the Blockchain network to unanimously stamp technology is used to add time dimension for each
and securely add or update data to the distributed ledger data block and the hash values stored in each block correctly
of Blockchain, while solving the problem of ownership identifies the current and parent block [71]. Data traceability
confirmation in transaction process as well as maintaining has high impact in the areas of financial transactions, clinical
the system integrity [71]. These Blockchain transactions are trials [72], and supply chain management [49] and [62].
accomplished without intervention of a third party to ensure
trust due to the use of the failsafe consensus protocols provid- g: ANONYMITY
ing the basis for the trust [16]. Elimination of these ‘‘middle- Anonymity characteristic of Blockchain supports privacy,
men’’ to ensure trust results in decreasing the overall cost of which is defined to be protected from unauthorized intru-
transactions. sion or observation. Anonymity is achieved by authenticating
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transactions without revealing any personal information of multiple copies of it in various nodes across the Blockchain
parties involved in the transaction. The data is exchanged network, effectively guaranteeing the reliability and integrity
between nodes using a defined algorithm establishing trust, of data [71].
hence the information of the nodes does not need to be
k: PROGRAMMABILITY
revealed or verified and the information transfer can be car-
ried out anonymously [31]. Users in a Blockchain system can Blockchain technology is open source and users can develop
interact with generated Blockchain addresses to keep their applications through a common application programming
real identities hidden [16] and [72]. However, Blockchain interface [16] and [50]. The flexible script coding system can
cannot guarantee perfect privacy due to its inherent nature of be used to create advanced smart contracts or other decen-
distributed and public environment [72] and, hence, that is tralized applications [71]. The SDN controllers of the nodes
why some researchers have used the term pseudonymity [70] are used to provide programming interface for network man-
to define this characteristic of the Blockchain where anyone agement [42]. Li et al. [15] proposed a Blockchain-based data
can create a Blockchain address and it is not possible to sharing system, called MeDShare, for cloud service providers
connect that address to a person without information from consisting of user layer, data query layer, data structuring
other sources [34]. provenance layer, and existing database infrastructure layer.
All Blockchain systems provide some programming language
h: DEMOCRATIZED to implement transaction logic [70]. Ferrag et al. [42] suggest
In a Blockchain system, decisions are made democratically that these APIs should be as user friendly as possible. Exam-
by all nodes using P2P approach [70]. Consensus algorithms ples of programmable blockchains consist of Ethereum, Tron,
are used by all decentralized nodes to allow specific nodes and Cardano among others.
for adding new blocks to an existing Blockchain as well as l: FAULT TOLERANCE
to ensure the block is appropriately appended to the shared
Blockchain is inefficient and redundant by design to pro-
ledger and its copies across the Blockchain nodes are syn-
vide high levels of immutability and fault tolerance, both of
chronized properly [12], [70], [71]. All nodes participating
which are important Blockchain characteristics [52]. Since
in this decision process are relatively independent, possess
Blockchain network uses P2P architecture, each node is con-
equal rights and obligations, share data, and jointly maintain
sidered equal to every other node and every node can act
information in the Blockchain resulting in low maintenance
both as a client or as a server which gives the network an
cost overheads [71]. Nodes can vote based on their computing
extremely high margin of error for nodes coming and going
power, accepting valid blocks by working on extending them
offline, for network transport issues, etc. [52]. Blockchains
and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them [54]
are designed to be Byzantine Fault Tolerant, which means
and [72].
the network will come to a consensus even if some nodes
i: INTEGRITY are down or not acting correctly. A consensus protocol is
considered fault tolerant if it can recover from failure of a
Blockchain systems, by design, are inherently resistant to
node participating in consensus [33]. Fault tolerance of the
changes in data. Data integrity is the assurance that the data
Blockchain system can recover from either fail-stop faults
in the Blockchain remains accurate and consistent over its
where some nodes fail to participate in the consensus protocol
entire life cycle [12]. This feature is achieved due to the
due to software or hardware reasons or Byzantine faults
decentralized and virtually immutable shared ledgers across
where nodes start to misbehave due to either software bugs
the Blockchain network which means once a data block is
or malicious attacks [33].
agreed upon to be added to a Blockchain, the transaction
record of that block cannot be edited or modified. This m: AUTOMATIC
data is permanently preserved in the Blockchain system with Smart contracts on the Blockchain can automatically
multiple copies of it in various nodes across the Blockchain perform transaction generation, decision making, and data
network, effectively guaranteeing the reliability and integrity storage [70]. All nodes in the system can automatically trans-
of data [71]. act and verify data using specific consensus protocols [50].
The Blockchain is maintained and validated automatically
j: INTEGRITY through a protocol without manual intervention [50]. How-
Blockchain systems, by design, are inherently resistant to ever, just like any other computer program, smart contracts
changes in data. Data integrity is the assurance that the data can also suffer from bugs and errors with no easy way to fix
in the Blockchain remains accurate and consistent over its or update these contracts [51]. In addition, smart contracts
entire life cycle [12]. This feature is achieved due to the can also be attacked by hackers just like any other software
decentralized and virtually immutable shared ledgers across application.
the Blockchain network which means once a data block is
agreed upon to be added to a Blockchain, the transaction 3) CHALLENGES AND ISSUES
record of that block cannot be edited or modified. This Even though Blockchain technology has gained fast momen-
data is permanently preserved in the Blockchain system with tum and has become the focus of research community, it is
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not devoid of issues and challenges that need to be addressed 6) COST OF DECENTRALIZATION
for this technology to become mainstream and to be deployed Even though decentralization is considered one of the most
widespread. Some of the Blockchain issues and challenges important characteristics of Blockchain, it is not without
are as follows: a cost. For example, there is the open issue of consensus
algorithms balancing between security and resource effi-
4) SCALABILITY ciency regarding adaptively controlling the replication factor
Blockchain systems, as these exist today, suffer from scala- in shards [67]. Moreover, append-only chains with historical
bility issues [66] and [12]. These scalability issues rise from data, such as spent transactions, will continue to grow to sizes
limitations of low throughput, high transactional latency, and that ordinary nodes will eventually run out of storage and
increasingly high resource needs [12]. The storage space the Blockchain network may by controlled by few powerful
requirements for the Blockchain will continue to increase as nodes [67]. One of the possible solutions is to investigate
the number of transactions increase. For example, in Septem- pruning out-of-date blocks that need to be forgotten without
ber 2017, the Bitcoin size was about 158 GB with boot- compromising its immutability [37]. However, except for
strap time of approximately four days for adding a new some experimental work [35] and [59], the data pruning prob-
node [12]. Such large storage requirements may eventually lem remains an open issue [67]. Another important aspect of
result in few large businesses to take control of majority of cost is the monitory cost of using public Blockchain.
the nodes and may cheat whereas the other nodes are not
able to detect this fraud [36]. These large blockchains, ever 7) IRREVERSIBLE BUGS
growing bigger with new data nodes, may become unwieldy Due to the immutability of the Blockchain, if deployed smart
in terms of loading, computing, and synchronizing data and contracts have any bugs, there is no direct way to fix these
may bring big problems to client running the Blockchain bugs [68]. There is no easy way to patch a buggy smart con-
based system [16]. On-chain scaling and off-chain scaling tract without reversing the Blockchain which is a significantly
(state channels) are some of the suggested techniques to daunting task [51]. Even if there is a way to update the defect,
address the scalability issue, but these are in very early stages when a new version of an existing contract is deployed, there
and unproven techniques [12]. Edge computing is another is no way to automatically transfer data stored in the previous
suggested approach to address high computational resources version and the data needs to be manually updated in the new
and storage requirements distributed at the network edge, contract which makes it quite unwieldly [68]. Hence, properly
offloading the Blockchain and mining computation from the designing safe smart contracts using software engineering
power-limited nodes [12]. Kim et al. [48] provide a survey of principles and verification before deployment is critical [38]
various scalability solutions consisting of on-chain, off-chain, and [51].
sidechain, child-chain, and inter-chain-based solutions [48].
8) ENERGY INEFFICIENT
Authors in [156], discuss Blockchain scalability challenges
The Blockchain proof of work (PoW) consensus approach
and then classify the existing scalability solutions in two
for Bitcoin is an energy inefficient approach since the power
layers. The first layer focuses on changing the Blockchain
spent to reach consensus using the PoW approach is almost
structure in terms of its size and second layer divides the
15.77-Terawatt hour, which is 0.08% of world’s electricity
Blockchain in multiple committees.
consumption [63]. Most of this power is spent in computing
5) PERFORMANCE ISSUES the irreversible SHA256 hashing function [63]. Furthermore,
the resource-intensive design of the Blockchain system to
Blockchain systems suffer from performance issues such
verify its transactions and the inefficient use of scarce energy
as throughput bottleneck, transactions latency, and storage
resources for these financial activities is a serious threat for
constraints [68]. For example, smart contracts in the current
the global climate due to the greenhouse gas emissions [65].
Blockchain systems are executed serially by miners and val-
idators, which significantly limit the throughput [68]. Bitcoin 9) ATTACKS ON BLOCKCHAIN INTEGRITY
transactions usually are verified in one hour, which is accept- Despite high security characteristic of the Blockchain sys-
able but not good enough [16]. Lightning Network [60] is tems, these systems are still prone to several security and data
a proposed solution to this problem that uses Hashed Time- integrity attacks. These attacks may consist of PoW consen-
lock Contracts (HTLCs) with bi-directional payment chan- sus related such as 51% majority manipulation [41], consen-
nels allowing secure payments routing across multiple P2P sus delay due to distributed denial of service [44] and [58],
payment channels. Blockchain community needs to explore selfish mining, pollution log, Blockchain forking, orphaned
utilization of today’s concurrent multicore and cluster archi- blocks, de-anonymization, and block ingestion [64], double
tecture to address these performance issues [68]. In [154] spending attacks [58], and liveness attacks [89].
authors have performed a systematic study of performance
evaluation of Blockchain exiting solutions using empiri- 10) CENTRALIZATION ASPECTS
cal evaluation methods including experimental analysis and Even though Blockchain is inherently mostly decentral-
benchmarking. They also suggest recommendations to opti- ized, there are still centralized aspects such as cryptocur-
mize performance of Blockchain-based systems. rency exchanges that may result in vulnerability for hackers’
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TABLE 2. Unified Blockchain Characteristics and Related Issues.
attacks. Hackers can attack the single point of cryptocurrency III. EVOLUTION AND TYPES OF BLOCKCHAIN
exchanges to gain access [57]. These hacks have given rise to In this section, we classify Blockchain technology evolution
consideration for decentralized exchanges that do not store in three versions.
funds in a centralized location but rather promotes P2P cryp-
tocurrency trading which are more resistant to such hacking 12) EVOLUTION
attacks. The Blockchain 1.0 technology as part of Bitcoin is associ-
ated with an unknown company identified by a tag ‘‘Satoshi
11) IMMUTABILITY HINDERANCE Nakamoto’’ from 2008 [1]. Bitcoin used Blockchain 1.0 as a
Immutability feature of Blockchain may cause hinderance in way to solve the long-existed problems of double spending of
the use of Blockchain in some applications. If used in the digital cash and processing of digital transactions without the
healthcare domain, for instance, the immutability feature may need of any trusted third party as described below:
hinder implementation of the privacy laws which requires
that an individual has a right to request their personal health 13) TRANSACTION PROCESSING
data to be erased and not visible to others [40]. This is For long time, the financial institutions have been relying
a sensitive issue and application of Blockchain for health- on trusted third parties for processing electronic payments.
care cannot be done without addressing this legal obliga- These third parties provide mediation for disputes between
tion [40]. A summary of characteristics, mapping of related merchants and customers. These third parties spend time
terminologies in literature and relevant issues are shown in to provide additional information to customers and revers-
the Table 2. ing the transactions if required. It can increase the cost per
VOLUME 9, 2021 61055

transaction and limit the transactions carried out for a mer- cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, smart contracts like Ethereum,
chant within a specific time however, there is no other mecha- and Blockchain applications like health sector.
nism to make payments over communication channel without
a trusted third party. Blockchain provides a way to the willing 1) PERMISSIONLESS OR PUBLIC BLOCKCHAIN
parties to make transaction directly with each other without In permissionless or public Blockchain, system participants
any existing trusted third party. The money of stakeholders is do not need any permission to join the network [10]. This
protected by providing a cryptographic proof instead of any Blockchain is truly decentralized as participants can partic-
already existing trusted party [1]. ipate in consensus process, read and send transactions and
maintain the shared ledger [9]. New blocks can be published,
accessed and validated by all participants thus they can main-
14) DOUBLE SPENDING PROBLEMS tain a copy of the complete Blockchain [8].
The online payment system has been there for long time with Public blockchains are secure in formation and operation.
inherent problem of double spending. The double spending Though any participant can join the network and add transac-
problem is a potential flaw in online payment systems where tions as blocks, these blocks are verified by computationally
same digital money can be spent more than one time to make expensive consensus processes like puzzle solving or stacking
different transactions. This becomes possible by exploiting one’s own cryptocurrency. The tampering of the contents
the implementation details of saving money in the form of of blocks is protected by hashes and decentralized consen-
duplicated file or by providing falsified information [7]. sus. Also, a large number of nodes can be anonymous in
Blockchain in cryptocurrencies is used as a public ledger to Blockchain to protect their privacy [8].
store all the transactions happening. Transactions are stored Besides many benefits, public blockchains also have many
as a data structure in Blockchain called Blocks (described in open research issues as well. The challenges of achieving
detail in section 4 in this paper). New blocks are constantly efficiency are influenced by the large number of participants
added as transactions happen, thus continuously expanding and computationally expensive consensus mechanisms [10].
the Blockchain.
Cryptocurrencies are considered the first application of 2) PERMISSIONED OR PRIVATE BLOCKCHAIN
Blockchain and have already been functional as a digital pay- Permissioned or private blockchains are designed for a single
ment system on the Internet. With the ability of programming organization. Participants are allowed to join the network by
cryptocurrency as a network of decentralized trading of all invitation and play specific role to maintain the Blockchain
resources, it had already been extended into Blockchain 2.0 to in decentralized manner [10]. The private blockchains are
take advantage of more robust functionality of digital money. different from public blockchains as only authorized entities
Blockchain 2.0 was the next big tier in the development are allowed to join the network and maintain the blocks [9].
of Blockchain industry and is termed as ‘‘Smart Contracts’’. Permissioned blockchains are considered more secure
It is a concept for the decentralization of markets in general and efficient than public ones as only known participants
and support for transfer of many different kinds of assets join the network and tampering is similarly protected by
like stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages, smart properties etc., hashes and consensus of participants as in the case of pub-
beyond digital currency [7]. It was developed as a way to auto- lic blockchains. However, nodes in private blockchains are
matically enforce the rules agreed between interested parties not anonymous [9]. The open research issues in private
like traditional business contracts. With the advancement in blockchains are related to tampering of blocks and network
technology, it was realized that Blockchain can revolutionize being hacked by internal authorized participants.
all industries rather than just markets, payments, financial ser-
vices and economies. This gave birth to Blockchain 3.0 called 3) CONSORTIUM BLOCKCHAIN
Blockchain Applications beyond financial markets in areas Consortium blockchains are also private blockchains but are
including government, health, literature and culture and so meant for multiple organizations. Only invited and trusted
on [7]. participants are allowed to join and maintain the network.
Blockchain 3.0 is a platform to develop distributed and The consensus process in this type is relatively slow as
secure applications for all industries beyond the monetary compared to private blockchains, but faster than public
markets. It supports a universal and global scope and scale blockchains [10]. For security, consortium blockchains han-
by interconnection with the web technology. It is being seen dle information in more protected way for alteration as com-
as platform to contribute for the development of ‘‘Smart pared to private blockchains. The hacking is also protected
World’’, especially for resource allocation of physical-world better in this type of Blockchain based on better security mea-
and human assets [8], [9]. sures due to participants from multiple organizations [10].
IV. ARCHITECTURE OF BLOCKCHAIN
A. TYPES OF BLOCKCHAIN 4) ARCHITECTURE OF BLOCKCHAIN 1.0
Blockchains are classified into multiple types based on their (CRYPTOCURRENCIES)
usage and distinct attributes. All types of Blockchain exam- Blockchain 1.0 is a distributed ledger to store the digital cash
ples are presented in all versions of Blockchain including transactions between two parties efficiently. The transactions
61056 VOLUME 9, 2021

are stored as a growing list of records called ‘‘Blocks’’. These

blocks are resistant to any modification in them and are ver-
ifiable in a permanent way. A group of users joined together
by a P2P network typically manages the verification of the
ledger records. In order to make any changes within blocks,
a consensus is required between more than half of the users
of the network. This section discusses the details of design,
working and open research issues of these components of
Blockchain including blocks, network and consensus. FIGURE 3. Blocks in the Blockchain architecture [74].
5) BLOCK
A block is the data structure in Blockchain 1.0 to store
transaction records. As shown in the Figure 3, it consists of
two parts: 1) Block Header and 2) Block Body. The block
header contains following fields:
• Block Version: specifies the rules for block validation.
• Merkle Tree Root Hash: it stores the hash value of all
transactions in the block.
• Time Stamp: stamps the current time in seconds accord-
ing to universal time since January 1, 1970.
• nBits: threshold for a valid block hash.
• Nonce: a mathematical value starts with 0 and increases
with calculation of every hash.
• Parent Block Hash: points to the previous block. FIGURE 4. Categorization of Blockchain nodes [73].
The block body contains the transactions and transaction
counter. The maximum capacity of block to store the trans-
actions is determined by the block size and size of each c: ARCHIVAL NODE
transaction contained in it. It is a fully capable node in terms of space utilization. They
can be seen as full server that can host all Blockchain.
These nodes have the capability to add blocks in the
6) NETWORK
Blockchain, validate blocks, and enforce consensus essential
In general, there are two types of nodes in a Blockchain
for a Blockchain transaction.
network: 1) Full node 2) Lightweight node. However, authors
in [1] have further categorized these nodes based on their d: MINER NODES
functionalities which is illustrated in Figure 4.
All of the transactions are validated through special nodes,
called ’miners’ [75]. Miner nodes perform the required tasks
a: FULL NODE to add a block in the network as long as all other nodes
The full node is a fully functional node in the Blockchain agree. After this consensus the transaction is stored in a
network that performs role of the server. The full node has the decentralized node. In a public Blockchain these nodes can
capability to store copy of Blockchain nodes data and history earn by validating the transaction.
of Blockchain. In case of a transaction in Blockchain net-
work, full node is responsible to maintain consensus among e: STAKING NODE
other nodes by applying consensus algorithm and verify the Cryptocurrency Blockchain has a concept of staking node.
transaction. It also participates in future policy and decision This node determines based on rules and chance (proof of
making. luck [76]) that which node will create next block in the
Blockchain to get rewarded. The proof of work algorithm [77]
b: PRUNED NODE decides which node will be rewarded. Cryptocurrency node
This is a kind of reduced function nodes as compared to the such as raspberry pi cryptocurrency node [78] can also be
archival node. It is easier to understand from recalling the considered as an example of this node.
blocks in Blockchain architecture [74]. The pruned nodes in
the Blockchain have a set limit of block storage. These nodes f: AUTHORITY NODE
keep the blocks information from the starts, but when they Nodes in the Blockchain network that will implement consen-
reach the set limit, they only retain the header of blocks and sus algorithm or Proof-of-Authority are generally recognized
chain placement. as authority nodes in the network [73].
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g: MASTER NODE In terms of Blockchain, smart contract automatically

Master node in Blockchain network keeps full record of the enforces agreements between two or more parties without a
transaction and validate them. Master nodes are also consid- trusted intermediary. These smart contracts are implanted as
ered as back-end nodes of the network, which provide proof- computer programs in Blockchain softwares like Ethereum
of-stakes for cryptocurrency network [79]. Master nodes can and Hyperledger. Participants join the network depending
also be considered as wallet running on millions of computers upon the type of Blockchain and can request the execution
enabling the Blockchain up and running at real-time. of a particular contract for a transaction in the Blockchain
P2P network. The history of these transactions is stored in
Blockchain similar to digital currencies. The state of the con-
h: LIGHTWEIGHT NODE
tract and assets of participants are determined by the sequence
A lightweight node is also considered as simple payment ver-
of transaction in the Blockchain [142].
ification node [73]. According to authors in [80], lightweight
The correct execution of smart contracts does not rely on
nodes are becoming increasing feasible for Blockchain
a trusted third party similar to cryptocurrencies. Consensus
deployment because of their less resource consumption.
protocols [157] are there to resolve any potential conflict
Authors in [80] highlight the issue of reward for lightweight
between contractual parties. There are different consensus
node and nothing for full node who serve lightweight client
algorithms available for conflict resolution depending on the
in Blockchain network. The authors suggest that smart con-
platform [142].
tract can provide fair deployment environment. They suggest
1) Block
a unifying mechanism SmartLight that integrates payment
The blocks in smart contracts contain programming code
routine to reward full node for serving lightweight client in
for recording transaction for a particular contract. The further
the Blockchain network.
details of the design of blocks are same as for cryptocurren-
cies as discussed in section 4A.
i: CONSENSUS 2) Network
The Consensus is required to validate transaction and The types of nodes present in smart contract P2P net-
to update ledger. The first consensus algorithm used in work are same as described in section 4A. The permissions
Blockchain 1.0 was Proof-of-Work. for nodes to join the network are dependent on type of
Blockchain implementation from public, private or consor-
tium choices.
7) PROOF-OF-WORK (PoW)
3) Consensus
PoW is considered as main achievement of Bitcoin to reach
The consensus mechanism in smart contracts is used to
consensus in a distributed decentralized Blockchain network
resolve any dispute between participants and recording trans-
that could consists of 1000 of nodes. Consensus algorithm
actions for a particular contract. Different available platforms
decides how agreement is made between Blockchain nodes to
or frameworks for smart contracts (see section 7 for more
append a new block in the chain and the verification process.
details) implement different consensus algorithms (details of
To add a block and earn reward in PoW algorithm, the initiator
different consensus algorithms are available in section 6).
node applies cryptographic algorithm to produce a winning
value less than the set value of network. In case of more 9) ARCHITECTURE OF BLOCKCHAIN 3.0 (BLOCKCHAIN
than one node producing value, then this situation is dealt APPLICATIONS)
by analyzing the maximum value of PoW, which represents
Besides financial market, the Blockchain technology has
the higher amount of work done by the node. This node then
been adopted in many industries for development of dis-
allows to add a block and earn reward. This method is more
tributed applications e.g., games, user-generated content net-
suitable for scalable Blockchain network. However, it has
works, internet of things (IoT), smart hardware, supply chain,
few drawbacks including the cost of equipment’s for node
source tracing and economy sharing credits etc. Blockchain
to perform mining, low transaction rate and its vulnerability
technology provides many features to these distributed appli-
to be attacked. More consensus algorithms are described in
cations including better performance in terms of low latency
detail in section 6 of this paper.
and high throughput, simpler identity management and
enabling them for offline transactions and flexible maintain-
8) ARCHITECTURE OF BLOCKCHAIN 2.0 (SMART ability for system upgrades and easy bug recovery [10]. There
CONTRACTS) are some novel applications of Blockchain and some are
The concept of Smart Contracts is also not new and existing briefly reviewed, for example, authors in [153] claim that
in literature since 1994. It is defined as ‘‘a computerized fusion of Blockchain technology in existing deployed cloud
transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract’’. solution can reform cloud data centers in terms of their perfor-
The vision was to translate contractual clauses (collateral, mance enhancement and security. Authors in [171], recently
bonding, etc.) into code and implement them in the form of proposed the use of Blockchain for identity authentication
software or hardware to self-enforce them with minimal role issues in the smart grid through a secure and mutual authen-
of trusted intermediaries [23]. tication protocol. Similarly, in [173] authors first highlight
61058 VOLUME 9, 2021

the potential security threat on smart grid infrastructure and common and widely use is Bitcoin. This section describes a
then propose a Blockchain-based lightweight authentication number of important ADFs for developing commercial grade
protocol for the smart grid. Authors in [172] propose an Blockchain applications [94], [95].
efficient medical data storage and sharing mechanism using
double Blockchain. From double blockchain, they mean 11) BITCOIN
two blockchains first one for data storage and second for Bitcoin has been the seminal research work to lay the founda-
data sharing between hospitals and healthcare organizations. tion of Blockchain-based P2P digital currency systems [144].
Applications use Blockchain for their different needs e.g., Major contribution of the research on Bitcoin is the imple-
verifying the identities, keeping track of manufactured items mentation of the concept of direct digital payments with-
in the form of chain of item etc. out relying on trusted third-party financial system. Digital
A general Blockchain architecture is presented in the liter- signatures coupled with network timestamps transactions
ature as a layered architecture to develop distributed applica- by constructing hashing chain exploit hash-based PoW.
tions as shown in Figure 5 [9]. These interconnected blocks generate immutable distributed
database records that cannot be changed without redoing the
PoW. Bitcoin holds major shares in cryptocurrency world
today, but there are a number of other platforms available.
12) ETHEREUM
Ethereum has been developed as open-source public
Blockchain platform to implement decentralized applications
(DApps) [102]. Ethereum facilitates users to develop fairly
complex applications of different capabilities to perform arbi-
trary operations and hence it can be used to develop DApps
other than Cryptocurrencies. DApps actually exploit smart
contracts, a small immutable program stored in Ethereum net-
work, to represent resources such as currency, land and house.
The central component of this platform is Ethereum virtual
machine (EVM) to run DApps for complex algorithms. The
code for DApps is written in a contract-oriented programming
language Solidity [103].
13) HYPERLEDGER
FIGURE 5. A general Blockchain Layered Architecture [9]. Hyperledger fabric has been introduced as permissioned
Blockchain distributed operating system by IBM [85]. This
• Blockchain based business applications represent appli- hyperledger fabric is unique in a sense that it’s a first pro-
cation layer. grammable framework Blockchain system that allows user to
• The contact layer show programming approaches avail- run distributed application independent of native cryptocur-
able for Blockchain. rency. The authors in [85] firsts identified the limitation of
• The nodes participating in managing applications get order-execute architecture such as sequential execution, non-
incentives according to mechanisms listed in incentive deterministic code & confidentiality of execution. Hyper-
layer. ledger fabric introduces execute-order-validate Blockchain
• The consensus layer makes various consensus algo- architecture as shown in Figure 6. This proposal from the
rithms available for Blockchain applications. IBM became popular in Blockchain community. However,
• The network layer is composed of data propagation authors in [86] highlighted concerns in hyperledger fabric
and data verification mechanisms along with distributed or Blockchain technology. The first is that they cannot use
networking mechanisms. permission-less Blockchain, secondly lack of proven use
• The timestamped data blocks are part of data layer. cases and limited number of programmers that can develop
Chain structure, Merkle tree, cryptography and hash applications using this hyperledger fabric.
functions are used to manage security of these blocks. The core theme behind Hyperledger project is to develop
open-source Blockchain technology framework and the code
10) BLOCKCHAIN FRAMEWORKS base to be used by a large number of users from the different
Blockchain has been gaining widespread attention globally industries for heterogeneous application requirements [104].
but the success of the technology depends on the availabil- The Hyperledger project is managed by the Linux foun-
ity of the application development frameworks. There are a dation in cooperation with many industrial giants such as
number commercial as well as open-source application devel- IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Intel, and many more. The
opment frameworks (ADFs) available currently. The most Linux Foundation adopts modular umbrella approach for
VOLUME 9, 2021 61059

on Windows, Linux and Mac servers with a simple API and

command line interface. Scalability is one prime requirement
FIGURE 6. Execute-order-validate architecture [104]. for many block chain applications and MultiChain addresses
this issue by controlling the block size. Special metadata is
used in network transactions to grant privileges to participants
Hyperledger project. At the top level, the Linux Foundation
in MultiChain. All privileges are granted to the miner of the
and Hyperledger provide support to build the infrastruc-
first ‘‘genesis’’ block and this user acts as the first adminis-
ture. Technical, legal, and marketing support is included in
trator with sole authority for delegating privileges.
this infrastructure development task. Furthermore, below the
infrastructure layer, is the Hyperledger’s development and 16) OPENCHAIN
implementation of Fabric, Iroha, Sawtooth, Burrow, Grid,
OpenChain is one of the most popular open source
and Indy frameworks to cope with heterogeneous application
Blockchain frameworks with focus to achieve interoperabil-
requirements. The third layer in the Hyperledger project is
ity with existing applications by supporting highly scalable
tool support. A number of tools have been developed for these
Blockchain application developments [108], [109]. Interop-
frameworks such as Composer, Explorer, Caliper, Cello,
erability essentially means that OpenChain presents unique
Quilt and Ursa. These tools have been developed based on a
decentralized application gateway for pluggable integra-
specific framework but gradually they are being modified to
tion with existing applications’ backend [109]. This is a
achieve portability to other frameworks. Composer provides
significant technology achievement with the capability to
an environment to facilitate block chain technology applica-
promote mainstream adoption of Blockchain applications
tion development. Composer models business network and
development and deployment. In order to achieve high
consolidates data from conventional systems. Explorer mod-
scalability, OpenChain exploits multi-threading and data
ule can be used to develop web applications with user-centric
parallelization through OPEN Blockchain Load Balancing
interfaces to view status of the Blockchain application.
Protocol and ORapid consensus. In OpenChain, Scaffold,
a new technology concept, constitute payment schema for
14) TRON an application, which is transformed into OPEN state in
TRON is another open-source platform to realize decentral- the Blockchain application [108]. OpenChain supports het-
ized Internet and associated infrastructure for Blockchain erogeneous Blockchain platform and hence an application
applications [106]. The main claim to propose TRON proto- deployed on OpenCahin is essentially deployed on other
col is to provide support of high throughput, high scalability, Blockchain platforms with their own consensus algorithm
and high availability for all DApps in the TRON ecosystem. through OPEN cluster. At the start of the transaction pro-
The architectural design of the TRON consists of three layers, cessing in the OpenChain, ORapid consensus technique has
namely storage, core, and application layers. The TRON the capacity to handle fairly high volume of the transac-
protocol is language neutral as it uses Google Protobuf. tions. However, while the number of transactions increases
Core layer consists of a number of modules such as smart to the limit of the techniques, OpenChain executes OPEN
contracts, account management, and consensus. TRON has a Blockchain Load Balancing Protocol to dispatch transactions
stack-based virtual machine implementation with optimized toward other blockchains and hence archives data paralleliza-
instruction set. Solidity programming language can be used tion at very large scale.
to develop DApps. A distributed storage protocol comprising
of Block Storage and State Storage has been developed for 17) QUORUM
the TRON. Google’s LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key- Quorum is permissioned Blockchain open-source platform
value graph store, has been selected as storage to achieve supported by J P Morgan, one of largest financial institu-
high performance for the applications. All newly created tions on the globe [110]. Indeed, the support of J P Mor-
fork chains can be stored for a certain period of time into a gan for the Blockchain technology Quorum is based on the
full-node memory database namely KhaosDB. Ethereum codebase, but unlike Ethereum it provides permis-
sioned Blockchain platform with enhanced contract privacy
15) MULTICHAIN and high-performance applications [111]. The baseline func-
MultiChain is a platform for designing and implementing tional model of Quorum is very similar to Ethereum, but
private Blockchain applications. It helps easy to develop with substantial difference in the Network and peer permis-
and deploy applications within an organization or between sions management, greater transaction and contract privacy,
organizations in financial sectors [107]. Fundamentally, as a voting-based consensus mechanisms and performance.
private Blockchain technology, it copes with the issues of
mining, privacy and openness by managing user permis- 18) IOTA
sions at global level. In MultiChain, no one but participants IOTA is open source Blockchain platform for Internet of
can view the Blockchain’s activity with full control over Things (IoT) to facilitate secure communication and pay-
transactions. Moreover, proof of work is not needed for ment [112]. It is a Blockchain platform for IoT which
mining which minimizes the costs. MultiChain is available employs DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). Figure 7 illustrates
61060 VOLUME 9, 2021

to perform a computation and produce a value. The wining

value is less than the predefine value set by the network.
In PoW, there is a possibility of forking (i.e., two nodes
produce wining value), which is dealt by the network by
proof of work through the nodes. Research community has
proposed different variations of PoW algorithms, which are
highlighted in our classification in Figure 8.
1) PROOF OF WEIGHT
FIGURE 7. IOTA vs Bitcoin technology [24].
Proof of Weight consensus [145] model is based on Algorand
consensus that has an additional feature of ‘‘weight’’ in the
core idea of PoW. These weights are relative to the values pro-
duced by nodes to represent their contribution in the network.
both IOTA DAG and Bitcoin Blockchain based
The main idea is to prevent problem of ‘‘double spending’’
technology [23].
forking by adding the feature of relative weight.
19) EXONUM
2) PROOF OF REPUTATION
Exonum is an open-source application development frame-
work for developing heterogeneous domain such as legal, Proof of reputation [146] consensus mechanism builds the
financial and governmental fields [113] and [114]. The reputation of a node based on its participation, transactions
framework targets permissioned Blockchain applications in and assets. The node with the highest reputation value gen-
these domains and its core has been developed in Rust pro- erates a new block and this block is validated by voting in
gramming language based on service-oriented architecture. the Blockchain. This mechanism allows degradation in the
Java Binding tool for Exonum facilitates application services reputation of nodes in case of misconduct in the past and also
development on the Exonum framework for permissioned adds to the security of the Blockchain.
blockchains.
Few more promising Blockchain frameworks are proposed 3) PROOF OF SPACE
recently including Corda and Ripple. In the presence of a Proof of space [147] is a flavor of PoW where a node that
large number of frameworks, it is challenging to select one requests service must dedicate the ample amount of disk
appropriate to satisfy application requirements. Though there space as compared to do the computation in PoW. Information
can be a number of criteria but we opt the criteria given in the is sent to the verifier node as a proof that ample amount of
Table 3 to meet the users’ needs [115]. space is allocated against a service request.
A comparison of various development frameworks in terms
of different characteristics and properties is shown in Table 3. 4) PROOF OF HISTORY
Proof of history consensus mechanism requires node to pro-
V. CONSENSUS MECHANISMS vide a proof of history [147]. It creates a historical record to
The consensus mechanism is used for validating the trans- provide evidence that an event is occurred at specific time.
action and to reach a consensus in effect of a transaction This provides as alternative of trusting the timestamp on the
on ledger update. There have been various consensus mod- transaction.
els proposed in literature and are implemented by different
Blockchain platforms. According to authors in [87], Quorum 5) PROOF OF BURN
is the first Blockchain platform to employ different consensus Proof of burn [148] consensus mechanism is based on the
model. In this section, we review, classify and compare vari- concept of burning coins to compete to mine the upcoming
ous consensus algorithms used and proposed for Blockchain block in the Blockchain. Burning coins here means sending
technology. the digital currency to an address where it is irretrievable. The
Figure 8 shows our classification of Blockchain consensus nodes burn more coins to increase their chances of getting
model based on the review of literature. As it can be seen selected in the lottery.
from Figure 8 that consensus models are classified in eight In comparison to PoW, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)
major categories and some of them have further types based [144] is proposed as promising Blockchain consensus
on minor variations of their working. technology for Internet of Things Blockchain framework
namely IoTA. DAG has a prominent feature of scalabil-
A. PROOF OF WORK (PoW) ity as the blocks are added in parallel in the Blockchain
Proof of Work is termed as one of pioneering consensus in DAG. It allows to add a block immediately into the
models for Blockchain technology. The main idea in PoW ledger as they process previous transaction. DAG also deal
is to compete for generating new block in the Blockchain with the issue of ‘‘double spending’’ by using effective
based on computational power. This algorithm requires miner algorithms.
VOLUME 9, 2021 61061

FIGURE 8. Classification of Blockchain consensus mechanisms.
TABLE 3. Comparative analysis of the Characteristics of Various Frameworks.
B. PROOF OF STAKE (PoS) D. PROOF OF eXercise (PoX)

The main advantage of Proof-of-Stake is that it does not Another alternate to the PoW is proposed by authors in [99]
require its node to purchase expensive equipment to perform called Proof-of-exercise (PoX). In PoX, an exercise is a
mining. In PoS, a node can perform mining or validating a matrix based on real world scientific problem. The miners
block based on proofing its stake i.e., number of coins. PoS will solve matrix-based problems given by employee in the
suggests purchasing cryptocurrency and uses the same to buy system. They suggest DNA and RNA sequencing and data
chances of block creation [88], [89]. comparison as an example of matrix solving problems.
1) DELEGATED PROOF OF STAKE (DPoS)

E. BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANCE (BFT)
A variation of PoS algorithm is proposed in [96] called
In case of loss of system service or failure because of Byzan-
Delegated Proof-of-Stake. It is suggested to use voting from
tine fault in Blockchain require consensus [20]. The nodes
stakeholders to elect the witness node, which will create
in the network should reach to consensus even some nodes
block in the chain. The witness node gets payment for block
fail to respond and maintain consistency of this information
creation, but if the selected witness node cannot produce
in the Blockchain network. It is a challenge considering the
block, then it will not be allowed in future voting process.
distributing system.
C. PROOF OF EXISTENCE (PoE)
PoE is proposed as a system to verify the existence of cer- 1) PRACTICAL BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANCE (PBFT)
tain documents at specific time by timestamp of transaction. Authors in [93] propose ‘‘Practical Byzantine Fault Tol-
It could be used to provide data ownership information with- erance’’, an algorithm to deal with Byzantine faults.
out disclosing the actual data. This PoE model is helpful in To efficiently survive Byzantine faults in asynchronous
proving existence of copyright documents e.g., a patent. network, the authors in [93] propose first state-machine
61062 VOLUME 9, 2021

replication protocol. They consider distributed file system Table 4 shows the comparison of consensus algorithms based
and implement Byzantine fault tolerance. on key parameters such as the prominent feature of consensus
model, its fault tolerance and scalability.
2) DELEGATE BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANCE (DBFT)
NEO whitepaper presents a variation of standard Byzantine
VI. BLOCKCHAIN SECURITY
Fault Tolerance called delegated byzantine fault toler-
This section reviews various security issues and related
ance [97]. It is currently used by the NEO Blockchain core
research developments in detail.
library. They suggest it as a novel mathematical model that
can verify consensus behavior using a discrete model. This
can deal with untrustworthy participants better than other A. CHALLENGES AND FUTURE TRENDS RELATED TO
algorithms. SECURITY
Blockchain utilizes a P2P network instead of a central
3) SIEVE CONSENSUS authority such as a central bank to carry out financial
Sieve [149] is considered a type of Practical Byzantine Fault transactions [122]. The fact that Blockchain is decentral-
Tolerance (PBFT) consensus to deal with non-deterministic ized implies that an individual can verify and undertake
chain code execution. Different output can be produced in financial transactions in real-time. Over the recent past,
non-deterministic chain code execution by replicas. Sieve can researchers have managed to invent several Blockchain appli-
analyze the output in case of minor divergence detected in cations. Nevertheless, Bitcoin has been exposed to a wide
small number of replicas. variety of privacy and security issues. For instance, after
an individual links a public key with a person’s identity,
F. PROOF OF LUCK (PoL) he can browse previous transactions on the Blockchain and
Authors in [98] have considered the limitations of PoW and examine all transactions related to the specific public key.
proposed a new consensus model called Proof-of-Luck to Therefore, the main challenge is balancing the privacy and
reduce the required computational power for a transaction security of an individual and accountability [163]. Authors
and increase its throughput. This algorithm is based on TEE in [162] study Blockchain-based identity management
(trusted execution environment). It mainly consists of two systems.
functions PollRound and PollMine. A luck value a random According to [118], it is estimated that Blockchain tech-
number between 0 and 1 is assigned to each block as it is nology firms will earn a revenue of more than six billion by
mined. A cumulative luck value is calculated through summa- the year 2020. However, these earnings may be affected by
tion of all luck values within each block of the chain. Miner the vulnerabilities that are present in the Blockchain security
will prefer to append their block to the chain with highest luck and this factor is yet to be tackled by the distributed ledger
value. technology (DLT) [123].
The Internet of Things (IoT) usually enables a smart work-
G. PROOF OF IMPORTANCE (PoI) force, such as an interaction between human beings and
This algorithm is used by NEM (XEM) [101]. This cryptocur- machines, as well as machine to machine interaction [124].
rency introduces the concept of harvesting which is similar Evidence indicates that although there are numerous bene-
to mining. This algorithm uses the concept of network theory fits of IoT and Blockchain technologies, there are several
to define rating of each account mainly based on vested and challenges that still exist. These challenges are related to
unvested coins. PoI relies on a number of days’ coins are tackling the security factors and dealing with privacy con-
in the account of a node in the network to estimate ‘‘impor- cerns. In addition to privacy and security concerns, other
tance’’. It allows 10% of current unvested amount vests every challenges that face IoT and Blockchain technology include
day. It is also calculated based on the rank of account within interoperability, legal issues, lack of standards, access con-
the network considering the number of vested coins held. trol, regulatory issues, developmental issues, and emerging
IoT economy issues.
H. PROOF OF ELAPSED TIME (PoET) Evidence indicates that most of the challenges associ-
This consensus mode uses lottery-based election model to ated with Blockchain technologies tend to be interrelated.
randomly select the new leader for adding block in the In [123], authors argue that the security challenges associ-
Blockchain. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is used ated with IoT and Blockchain technologies can be examined
to ensure secure environment for this process of election. The from the perspective of Bitcoin, which enables transactions
major steps in the process of election of leader are as follows: to occur in a decentralized manner [125]. In [155], authors
• Validator and miner nodes run TEE by Intel SGX. have performed a systematic exploration of Blockchain
• Every validator node requests a wait time attack surfaces. First, they highlight various attacks on a
• The node with the shortest wait time wins the election to Blockchain-based system and then explored the relation-
become a leader node. ships between these attacks. Now we briefly present the
Since it relies on specialized hardware, it is the main most common vulnerabilities and attacks in the Blockchain
drawback of utilizing this consensus mechanism [90], [91]. system.
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TABLE 4. Comparison of Consensus Algorithms.
B. 51% VULNERABILITY 3) Obstruct normal operations of mining for additional

Blockchain depends on a disseminated agreement mecha- miners.
nism to create a common trust. Nonetheless, the mechanism 4) Hamper the operation’s confirmation of ordinary
of consensus has a vulnerability of 51%, which attackers transactions.
might exploit to manage the whole Blockchain. Most notably,
in blockchains based on PoW, in case a miner’s hashing C. PRIVATE KEY SECURITY
control is accountable to above 50% of the entire hashing When utilizing Blockchain, the private key of the user is con-
control of the whole Blockchain, then a launch of 51% might sidered as credentials of recognition as well as security, which
occur. Therefore, the concentration on mining power on a the user generates and maintains rather than intermediary
small number of mining pools might lead to uncertainties of agencies. For instance, when building a cold storage holder in
unintended situations, for example, a pool being in charge of Bitcoin Blockchain, the private key must be imported by the
over half of the entire computing control. After the ghash.io user. A vulnerability scheme in Elliptic Curve Digital Signa-
pool in January 2014 reached 42 percent of the entire com- ture Algorithm (ECSA) was discovered by which, an invader
puting control of Bitcoin, many minors willingly left the might get the private key of the user as randomness cannot be
pool, and a press announcement was issued by ghash.io to generated by it during the process of signing. It will be hard
give the Bitcoin community reassurance of its avoidance in to recover the private key of the user the moment it gets lost.
getting to the threshold of 51%. In blockchains based on In case criminals steal the private key, the Blockchain account
PoS, there is a probability of an attack of 51% if the coin’s of the user will deal with the danger of others tampering
figures being in possession by one miner is above 50% of the with it. Because Blockchain does not rely on a centralized
whole Blockchain. intermediary trusted organization, in case the private key of
Through the launch of the 51% attack, the information on the user is stolen, it will be complex to trace the conduct of the
Blockchain might be arbitrarily manipulated and modified by criminal and salvage the Blockchain’s modified information.
an invader. Specifically, vulnerability can be exploited by an
invader to perform the attacks given below: D. CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
1) Overturn operation and start twofold spending strike Users of Bitcoin might possess numerous addresses of Bit-
(similar coins are used numerous times). coin, yet the address is not related to their actual identity in
2) Eliminate and adjust transactions ordering. real life. Hence Bitcoin is vulnerable to illegitimate activities
61064 VOLUME 9, 2021

through certain intermediary platforms of trading that assist Furthermore, the minor nodes of Blockchain require high
Bitcoin. Because the procedure is anonymous, user’s conduct power of computation. Nonetheless, the required high power
is difficult to trace, therefore they avoid legitimate sanctions. of computation for the nodes contributes to the system cost.
An enhanced method involves decreasing the computation
E. MONEY LAUNDERING need for mining and associating the powers of the mining
A Dark Wallet is an application of Bitcoin that might cause node towards its trustworthiness or its reputation within the
the transaction of Bitcoin to be totally private. Information platform. Additionally, simpler schemes of cryptocurrency
on transaction might be encrypted and user’s legitimate coins might be built to decrease the need for computation for data
are mixed with chaff money by the Dark Wallet. This makes encryption and signing.
money laundering easier.
J. SCALABILITY
F. UNDERGROUND MARKETPLACE Blockchain technology is scaling better compared to con-
Inside the secretive marketplace, Bitcoin is always utilized as temporary centralized methods. Though, there are reports
the legal tender. For instance, Silk Road is an international of reduced levels of performance of the technology because
nameless marketplace that functions as unknown services, higher number of nodes. This remains a main challenge, par-
and Bitcoin is applied as its currency of exchange. The major- ticularly with applications of network safety, where numerous
ity of merchandise being traded in the Silk Road are illegal users require service and there is a fast scaling of the network.
drugs or certain items that are regulated within the ordinary Also, the system dynamicity contributes to issues of scaling
world. Because global dealings make up for Silk Road major because there is need for nodes to regularly send transaction
proportion, the underground market transaction is made more updates. The Hyperledger and Ethereum platform possess
convenient by Bitcoin, which could lead to harm the safety of their individual scalability promises. Nonetheless, the oper-
the society. ation experiments reveal that the two platforms continue to
improve in certain aspects related to scalability.
G. DOUBLE SPENDING
Though the consensus mechanism of Blockchain can authen- K. TIME CONSUMPTION
ticate transactions, it is still challenging to evade dual spend- Offering services of security require fast capabilities of pro-
ing. Double spending means that consumers can use the same cessing, particularly within the existing networks, where bil-
single digital token multiple times. For instance, an invader lions of dollars can be the cost of milliseconds. Besides,
could control race invasion for dual payments. It is rela- mining as well as accomplishing consensus still consume
tively easy to execute this method of attack in blockchains time in blockchains.
based on PoW since the invader might take advantage of the
intermediary period between double transactions’ launch as L. CONFIDENTIALITY, INTEGRITY AND AUTHENTICATION
well as confirmation to initiate an attack quickly. Before the There is a considerable need for elevating privacy and secu-
subsequent operation is mined as null, the invader has by now rity issues concerning the attributes of various IoT elements.
gotten the output of the initial transaction, leading to dual Researchers argue that the current technology can be used to
spending. authorize, authenticate, and audit data that has been generated
by these devices. Blockchain can create new foundations for
H. TRANSACTION PRIVACY LEAKAGE both social and economic systems. Blockchain can also be
It is easy to trace the behavior of the user in Blockchain, the described as more than just a foundation for the circulation
Blockchain platform takes actions to guard the user’s trans- of cryptocurrency, and it also provides a secure means of
action secrecy. Zcash and Bitcoin apply one-time financial exchanging various services, goods, and transactions [131].
records to keep the received cryptocurrency. Furthermore, A decentralized strategy can provide numerous benefits
the user is required to give every transaction a private key. in terms of information authenticity, neutrality, security, and
Thus, the invader cannot deduce if the cryptocurrency in a dis- fault tolerance. Peers in the blockchain network must contain
similar transaction is acknowledged via the equivalent user. some functionalities such as storage, routing, mining, and
Users could include a few chaff coins (known as ‘‘mixis’’) wallet services. Nevertheless, researchers argue that scalabil-
in Montero during transaction initiation such that the invader ity and storage capacity of Blockchain has been questioned
might not deduce the connection of real coins used via the over the years. The main reason is that the chain in this
deal. technology has been expanding at a rate of one megabyte
per block every ten minutes in Bitcoin [132]. Furthermore,
I. COMPUTATION AND MINING NODES evidence indicates that numerous copies have been stored
In the majority of present applications, nodes are simple, within the nodes in the network. Manual processes have
and the capabilities of computation are not high. Specifically, been optimized and transformed by IoT to ensure that they
the client of Blockchain requires to remain simple to meet fit in the digital era through making resolutions from lim-
the reduced needs of computation. Conversely, the services ited logs of Blockchain without dissemination of consen-
of security, generally require high computation capability. sus. Authors in [175], proposed a covert communication
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TABLE 5. Cryptographic Primitives used for Security in Blockchain.
system for Bitcoin, which uses Blockchain as a covert blockchain. To solve these problems, experts have attempted
communication channel to transmit covert messages to develop numerous approaches that are specifically geared
for Bitcoin. Similarly, in [176], the authors provide a scheme towards resource utilization.
and theoretical support for covert communication over The blockchain-based smart homes work in three basic
Blockchain using a special Bitcoin address using the tool tiers which are known as an overlay network, cloud stor-
Vanitygen. age, and smart home. The system requires that every smart
home will be equipped with a highly capable device called a
M. COMMUNICATION OVERHEAD ‘‘miner.’’ Such a device will have the capability of handling
The nodes in blockchain are forced to dispatch transactions various forms of communications that take place within and
regularly to revise the Access Control List or amend the outside the home. The miner node in the Blockchain can
information on the provenance. Conversely, the technology of audit and managing all forms of communication. Researchers
Blockchain is a P2P network, where considerable operational claim that this Blockchain-based smart home framework is
cost is due to the traffic of the network and the processing capable of examining security issues such as integrity, confi-
abilities of the system. The blocks and transactions require dentiality, and availability.
broadcasts. Therefore, the added overhead to the network Authors in [134], suggest Bitcoin technologies provide
is imperative as well as a challenge. The processing and weak anonymity, and they propose a system that can safe-
storage overhead present a challenge in adapting blockchains guard the privacy of the user in Bitcoin.
applications of security [133].
Evidence indicates that most of the security problems are O. BLOCKCHAIN ALGORITHMS FOR SECURITY
due to the three major areas, network links, authentication, In Blockchain, privacy is a significant issue. For example, the
and transactions. Therefore, technologies that allow incor- address of Bitcoin payer can be seen by anyone and every
rect connections, and their expansion with other technologies transaction’s content in the Blockchain of Bitcoin. This can
could raise numerous security concerns. A summary of risks be counter by various advanced cryptographic primitives such
and related causes is shown in Table 5. as:
N. CRYPTOGRAPHIC PRIMITIVES
1) HASH FUNCTIONS
Despite the fact that numerous works of literature are dedi-
cated to the privacy and security of Blockchain issues, there The hash function has two basic requirements, which are
is a lack of systematic evaluation of the cryptographic primi- known as collision-resistance and one-way functionality. The
tives in blockchains. Evidence indicates that there are a num- key use of hash is to ensure data integrity for online or offline
ber of strategies that can be used to deal with these hurdles. transactions. A hash function could be used to ensure that
Blockchain technology utilizes a decentralized architec- a file is downloaded from the online source is authentic.
ture which implies that all devices must be connected to a In blockchain applications, the hash functions could be used
network in order to corporate and interact using predefined in the generation of address, PoW, bridge mechanism, gen-
protocols. Recent research efforts have managed to signifi- eration of random or pseudo numbers (PNG), generation of
cantly improve Blockchain technology in terms of security. the blocks, and message digest in signatures (MDS). The
For instance, every person who accesses the Blockchain use of hashes in Blockchain gain popularity in cryptocur-
network is provided with a distinct identity that is directly rency applications. The most commonly used hash function
linked to his account. Such a mechanism ensures that only the in blockchains is SHA256 [141].
account owner performs transactions and other operations.
Analysts argue that Blockchain technologies offer decen- 2) DIGITAL SIGNATURE
tralized privacy and security, but they use a huge amount The concept of digital signature was built in 1976 by Hellman
of energy despite being exposed to computational overhead and Diffie when they first developed the public key cryptog-
and delays. Such challenges are the main factors that are raphy [141]. As a basic primitive of public-key cryptography,
actively being tackled by experts since they are not favorable the applications of digital signature are used for the authen-
for most resource-constrained IoT devices connected to the tication of source, integrity, and non-repudiation [141]. The
61066 VOLUME 9, 2021

Digital signature algorithm (DSA) ensures that the message business to build Blockchain solutions using new consensus
legitimate signatures cannot be forged. algorithms.
For the Blockchain technology to become mainstay tech-
3) ZCASH, zk-SNARK nology of the future for varying domains, it must resolve
Miers et al. proposed Zerocoin to offer the anonymity of several current issues. First, the Blockchain technology
Bitcoin through breaking coins traces [141]. Nonetheless, the needs to become scalable and must solve the limitations of
e-cash result could not sustain full-edge nameless payments, low throughput, high latency, and increasingly high storage
because Zerocoins utilize fixed value coins. Also, nameless demands. For example, it needs to investigate significantly
coins have to be transferred by someone into coins that are improving transaction execution performance by exploiting
nameless before payment. On the other hand, in transac- high concurrency of multicore and cluster architectures. The
tions, metadata or amount cannot be hidden. Therefore, Zero- resource inefficiency and monopoly by large organizations
cash was proposed to handle these problems. Particularly, with powerful nodes can be addressed by investigating con-
Zerocash offers anonymity and data transaction privacy with trolling chain sizes by pruning out-of-date and unneeded
nameless coins. Furthermore, Zerocash extensively decreases blocks without affecting immutability. The efficient deploy-
transaction’s size with a coin to below a kilobyte and reduce ment of updated smart contracts without much overhead is
the period of verification of a transaction below 6 minutes. another issue for the research community to solve. Finally,
the Blockchain community must eventually address environ-
4) ZERO-KNOWLEDGE (RANGE) PROOFS mental effects from the high energy consumption of a large
A normal concept to protect the confidentiality and number of nodes participating in reaching consensus, which
anonymity of a transaction is to make them unlikable. The may become a serious global climate issue.
system of electronic cash needs to authenticate if the online Microsoft and Intel have already joined hands to sup-
payer possesses classified information similar to the address port enterprise Blockchain [158] and the alliance believes
from where the cash is coming to process the transaction. that enterprise Blockchain success needs to cater the perfor-
It is pertinent to mention that the zero-knowledge proof was mance, confidentiality and governance issues [116]. ADFs
created to handle this situation. essentially need to integrate support for these issues to have
wider acceptability in various business domains. Blockchain
5) MONERO RING SIGNATURE technology has given rise to autonomous trust management
Monero employs ring signature technology to preserve the in a decentralized way between two concerned parties in
privacy of users. Moreover, the ring signature is a type of the form of smart contracts while artificial intelligence (AI)
digital signature in which a group of potential signatories is paves the way for intelligent decision-making for machines
combined together to produce a distinct signature that can use at par with humans, and even in some cases with more
to authorize a transaction [23]. efficiency [117]. Integrated capabilities of Blockchain and
AI have great potential for emerging applications in various
VII. FUTURE PROSPECTS domains. For instance, trust of Blockchain and decision mak-
This survey paper has covered architecture of cryptocurren- ing of AI in healthcare and autonomous vehicles will result
cies, smart contracts and general Blockchain based applica- in excellent match for highly useful applications [170-173,
tions. Blockchain has a great potential to revolutionize the 120]. Consequently, future ADFs will be required to provide
way of doing businesses and making payments across the inherent support for such functionalities.
world without consideration of geographical boundaries and In future, there are two major challenges in promoting
trusted intermediaries. Blockchain has also has phenomenal Blockchain security. One is to balance the privacy and secu-
potential in establishing transparent, democratic and secure rity of an individual and accountability, mainly due to DLT.
fabric for other industries of the world. Many aspects of all The other is to address security and privacy issues brought
versions of Blockchain are going to remain hot research top- by the IoT, such as interoperability, legal challenges, lack
ics including consensus mechanisms, network management of standards, rights issues, regulatory issues, developmental
in terms of efficiency. Some key findings and future research issues, and emerging IoT economy issues, etc.
directions are discussed below in this section. Prospects of future Blockchain projects are discussed by
The business and research community has shown incred- authors in [158] including future development directions
ible interest in adopting Blockchain technology in the last and future trends. There are a number of novel use cases
decade. Consensus algorithms play a vital role in ensuring where this technology could excel in the future including
consistent operations of Blockchain application. The impor- energy trading [165], vehicle life cycle tracking [164], smart
tant future direction in terms of consensus algorithms is grid [160], and Blockchain for tax management system etc.
the transition from PoW to new algorithms such as PoS.
Ethereum has already started working on it and will be look- VIII. CONCLUSION
ing towards the implementation and performance analysis Blockchain is a transformational technology, which pro-
aspect of this transition. Another interesting future prospect is vides a basis to develop distributed and secure applications
how new Cryptocurrencies like NEM and EOS will motivate for all industries beyond the monetary markets. Due to its
VOLUME 9, 2021 61067

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[174] W. Wang and C. Su, ‘‘CCBRSN: A system with high embedding capacity HAFIZ FAROOQ AHMAD received the Ph.D.
for covert communication in bitcoin,’’ ICT Systems Security and Privacy degree in distributed computing from Tokyo Insti-
Protection (IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technol- tute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. He is cur-
ogy), vol. 580, M. Hölbl, K. Rannenberg, and T. Welzer, Eds. Cham, rently an Associate Professor with the College
Switzerland: Springer, 2020. of Computer Sciences and Information Technol-
[175] L. Zhang, Z. Zhang, W. Wang, R. Waqas, C. Zhao, S. Kim, and H. Chen, ogy (CCSIT), King Faisal University, Al Ahsa,
‘‘A covert communication method using special bitcoin addresses Saudi Arabia. He is the pioneer for Semantic Web
generated by vanitygen,’’ Comput., Mater. Continua, vol. 65, no. 1, Application Firewall (SWAF) in cooperation with
pp. 597–616, 2020.
DTS Inc., Japan, in 2010. He contributed in agent
cites project, a European funded research and
MUHAMMAD NASIR MUMTAZ BHUTTA development project for agent systems. He initiated Scalable fault tolerant
received the B.C.S. degree (Hons.) from Inter- Agent Grooming Environment (SAGE) Project and proposed the concept
national Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan, of decentralized multi agent systems SAGE back, in 2002. He has more
in 2004, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from than 100 international publications, including a book on security in sensors.
the University of Surrey, U.K., in 2007 and 2012, His research interests include semantics systems, machine learning, health
respectively. He is currently working as an Assis- informatics, and Web application security. He has been awarded a number
tant Professor with King Faisal University. He is of national and international awards, such as the Best Researcher Award of
an active researcher with numerous publications the Year 2011 by NUST, the PSF/COMSTECH Best Researcher of the Year
in international conferences and journals. He has 2005, and the Star Laureate Award, in 2004.
contributed to several research projects, including
three research projects funded from EADS Astrium U.K., ESA, and ESPRC
U.K. He is also focusing on technical and management aspects of Cyber
Security for the IoT, smart cities, and blockchain.
AMIR A. KHWAJA received the bachelor’s

degree in computer engineering from NED Uni-
versity of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, MUHAMMAD KHURRAM KHAN (Senior
Pakistan, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in com- Member, IEEE) is currently working as a Professor
puter science from Arizona State University, Ari- of cybersecurity with the Center of Excellence
zona, USA. Since 2014, he has been an Assistant in Information Assurance, King Saud University,
Professor with the College of Computer Sciences Saudi Arabia. He is the Founder and the CEO
and Information Technology, King Faisal Univer- of the Global Foundation for Cyber Studies and
sity, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia. Prior to that he had Research, Washington DC, USA, an independent
21 years of semiconductor industry experience. and non-partisan cybersecurity think-tank. He has
He worked for 20 years at Intel Corporation, USA, in various capacities, published more than 400 papers in the journals and
such as a CAD Software Developer, an XScale and Atom Mobile System- conferences of international repute. In addition,
on-a-Chip (SoC) Validation Architect, a Validation Program Manager, and he is an Inventor of ten US/PCT patents. His research interests include
a Senior Engineering Manager. He worked as a Principal Engineer and cybersecurity, digital authentication, the IoT security, biometrics, multimedia
Senior Manager for one year at Qualcomm, San Diego, California, USA, security, cloud computing security, cyber policy, and technological innova-
leading the successful completion of the validation of Qualcomm’s Femtocell tion management. He is a Fellow of the IET, U.K., the BCS, U.K., and the
SoC product. He has also worked as an Adjunct Faculty with Arizona FTRA, South Korea. He is the Vice Chair of IEEE Communications Society
State University and the University of Phoenix. He is currently serving at Saudi Chapter. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE. He is the Editor-
Qualcomm. in-Chief of Telecommunication Systems (Springer-Nature) with its recent
impact factor of 1.73 (JCR 2020). He has edited ten books/proceedings
ADNAN NADEEM (Member, IEEE) received the published by Springer-Verlag, Taylor & Francis, and IEEE. He is on the
Ph.D. degree from the Institute for Communica- editorial board of several journals including, IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS
tion Systems, U.K., in 2011. He has been an Asso- & TUTORIALS, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS
ciate Professor and the Coordinator of MS Security JOURNAL, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONSUMER ELECTRONICS, Journal of Network
Technology Program with the Faculty of Com- & Computer Applications (Elsevier), IEEE ACCESS, IEEE Consumer Elec-
puter and Information System (FCIS), Islamic tronics Magazine, PLOS One, and Electronic Commerce Research.
University of Madinah, KSA, since 2016. He is
currently with the Federal Urdu University of Arts
Science and Technology, Pakistan. For the last five
years, he earned several research grants. He has
published more than 50 articles in international conferences and journals,
including a patent accepted and sealed by the Government of Pakistan.
He has mainly worked on network layer security, QoS and reliability issues
of mobile Ad Hoc, and sensors networks. He is currently focusing on
Blockchain technology and the IoT applications and security. He received MOATAZ A. HANIF received the master’s degree
the 5th HEC Outstanding Research Award 2013/14 for his article published in cybersecurity engineering from Embry-Riddle
in the IEEE COMMUNICATION SURVEY & TUTORIALS. During his pedagogical Aeronautical University. He is currently a Com-
journey, he has received several awards and achievements, including the For- puter Engineer and AI Enthusiast. He has partic-
eign Ph.D. Scholarship, Associate Fellowship of Higher Education Academy ipated in several publications in the Blockchain
(AFHEA), U.K., in 2009, and the Best Paper and Best Track Paper Award field and is currently working in the cybersecurity
in the ICICTT 2013 and ICEET 2016 conferences, respectively. He received field as IR Team Lead.
Nishan-e-Imtiaz for his outstanding research from Federal Urdu University,
Pakistan, in August 2016. He received the Best Academic Advisor and Best
Researcher Award from FCIS, Islamic University of Madinah, in 2018.
61072 VOLUME 9, 2021

HOUBING SONG (Senior Member, IEEE) MAJED ALSHAMARI received the B.Sc. degree
received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in computer information systems from King Faisal
from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, University, Saudi Arabia, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D.
VA, USA, in August 2012, and the M.S. degree degrees in information systems from University of
in civil engineering from the University of Texas, East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Prior to that, he has
TX, USA, in December 2006. been an Assistant Professor, since 2011. Since
In August 2017, he joined the Department of 2012, he has been the Dean of the College of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Sciences and Information Technology,
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, FL, where King Faisal University. Since 2017, he has been an
he is currently an Assistant Professor and the Associate Professor with the College of Computer
Director of the Security and Optimization for Networked Globe Laboratory Sciences and Information Technology, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa,
(SONG Lab). From August 2012 to August 2017, he served on the Faculty of Saudi Arabia. He has been leading a number of academic and scientific
West Virginia University. In 2007, he was an Engineering Research Associate funded projects related to usability, HCI, and HIS. His research interests
with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. He is the author of more than include HCI, information systems developments, and big data.
100 articles. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, cyber-
security and privacy, the Internet of Things, edge computing, AI/machine
learning, big data analytics, unmanned aircraft systems, connected vehicle,
smart and connected health, and wireless communications and networking.
His research has been featured by popular news media outlets, including
IEEE GlobalSpec’s Engineering360, USA Today, U.S. News & World
Report, Fox News, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
(AUVSI), Forbes, WFTV, and New Atlas.
Dr. Song is a Senior Member of ACM and an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
He was a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the 12th IEEE International
Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom-2019),
the Best Paper Award from the 2nd IEEE International Conference on
Industrial Internet (ICII 2019), the Best Paper Award from the 19th Inte-
grated Communication, Navigation and Surveillance technologies (ICNS
2019) Conference, the Best Paper Award from the 6th IEEE International
Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (CBDCom 2020), and the
Best Paper Award from the 15th International Conference on Wireless
Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA 2020). He has been serving
as an Associate Technical Editor for IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE, since
2017, an Associate Editor for IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, since
2020, and IEEE JOURNAL ON MINIATURIZATION FOR AIR AND SPACE SYSTEMS YUE CAO (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
(J-MASS), since 2020, and a Guest Editor for IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED degree from the Institute for Communication
AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS (J-SAC), IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, IEEE Systems (ICS) (formerly known as Centre for
Network, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, IEEE SENSORS Communication Systems Research), University of
JOURNAL, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, and Surrey, Guildford, U.K., in 2013. Further to his
IEEE JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND HEALTH INFORMATICS. He is the editor Ph.D. study, he had conducted research as a
of six books, including Big Data Analytics for Cyber-Physical Systems: Research Fellow with the University of Surrey, and
Machine Learning for the Internet of Things (Elsevier, 2019), Smart Cities: as an Academic Faculty with Northumbria Uni-
Foundations, Principles and Applications (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017), Secu- versity, Lancaster University, U.K., and Beihang
rity and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems: Foundations, Principles, and University, China. He is currently a Professor with
Applications (Chichester, UK: Wiley-IEEE Press, 2017), Cyber-Physical the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China. His
Systems: Foundations, Principles and Applications (Boston, MA: Academic research interests include intelligent transport systems, including e-mobility,
Press, 2016), and Industrial Internet of Things: Cybermanufacturing Systems V2X, and edge computing.
(Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016).
VOLUME 9, 2021 61073

A Survey on Blockchain Technology Evolution Architecture and Security

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SPECIAL SECTION ON INTELLIGENT BIG DATA

ANALYTICS FOR INTERNET OF THINGS, SERVICES AND PEOPLE

A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution,

I. INTRODUCTION In a layman term, Blockchain is defined as the chain of

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computers, often referred to as nodes. These nodes form a

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applications through an open interface to query data of d: SECURITY

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TABLE 2. Unified Blockchain Characteristics and Related Issues.

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are stored as a growing list of records called ‘‘Blocks’’. These

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g: MASTER NODE In terms of Blockchain, smart contract automatically

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on Windows, Linux and Mac servers with a simple API and

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to perform a computation and produce a value. The wining

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FIGURE 8. Classification of Blockchain consensus mechanisms.

TABLE 3. Comparative analysis of the Characteristics of Various Frameworks.

B. PROOF OF STAKE (PoS) D. PROOF OF eXercise (PoX)

1) DELEGATED PROOF OF STAKE (DPoS)

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TABLE 4. Comparison of Consensus Algorithms.

B. 51% VULNERABILITY 3) Obstruct normal operations of mining for additional

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TABLE 5. Cryptographic Primitives used for Security in Blockchain.

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AMIR A. KHWAJA received the bachelor’s

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