Blockchain Based Techniques for Several Network Security Services and Their Challenges

Network security services such as privacy, data provenance, authentication, encryption, and integrity assurance are imperative for today's decentralized applications, especially due to sizeable volume of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. At present, these security services are provided by centralized controllers or by adopting weak distributed approaches. Thus, they are apt to suffer malicious attacks. On the contrary, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can provide a fully distributed, provably secure, and consensus solution. This paper x-rays different potentials as well as some challenges of proposed blockchain-based approaches for several network security services. To this end, theoretical underpinnings of numerous papers published in high ranked scientific journals are utilized in the research for streamlining our assessment and capturing the continuously expanding blockchain domain. Based on a structured, systematic review and thematic content analysis of the discovered literature, we present some blockchain-based techniques for providing security services. Furthermore, we experimentally determined the individual efficiency of some blockchain-based techniques providing security services. This is achieved by employing TestRpc and AppDetectivePro to evaluate the performance of each technique. The results show that blockchain-based techniques are over 90% efficient in providing security services. Finally, foreseeable challenges associated with blockchain-based security service are also discussed to prod further research