A systematic literature review on endpoint vulnerabilities of blockchain applications

Blockchain technology is a publicly accessible decentralized and immutable transaction log that significantly simplifies the recording of transactions and asset management in a corporate network. An asset can be tangible like a house, car, cash, or land, or intangible like intellectual property, patents, copyrights, or branding. It may considered as a unique identifier for every data, with each block in the ledger having its own hash and containing the previous block's hash. It is one of the most emerging technologies with added built-in flexibility that has changed the world. Because of its all-encompassing nature, it is being accepted and endorsed as a promising technology by financial and non-financial transaction platforms. However, like any other developing technology, it too has its own set of concerns, bottlenecks and obstacles including scalability, privacy, regulation, and security issues. Recent heists and hacks have raised serious questions about its existence and security. Endpoint vulnerabilities are one such crucial and inherently particular security concern that must be addressed. Thus, this study systematically reviews the literature to bring about the state-of-the-art to determine the possible factors, aspects, and causes of the endpoint vulnerabilities with some mitigation countermeasures. Several recent studies were selected to mine the endpoint vulnerability information and focus on the pertinent issues. The major revelation is the lack of user knowledge, insufficient security mechanism, no security layer other than authentication, keylogger malware behind endpoint vulnerability exploitation. It explains the various factors and root causes of endpoint vulnerabilities and provides a relation between the endpoint and its attribute/components. Lacking adequate mechanisms to counteract endpoint vulnerability attacks, users are more likely to make technical and behavioral blunders. Moreover, it fulfills the lack of any systematic literature review (SLR) on endpoint vulnerabilities. It aims to raise security awareness among users, enhance security measures for developers, and provide valuable insights for further investigation by researchers. This study is a step towards understanding and improving the security posture at the endpoints of blockchain networks.