River Publishers Series in Security and Digital Forensics – serie

Blockchain is an emerging technology that can radically improve transactions security at banking, supply chain, and other transaction networks. It’s estimated that Blockchain will generate $3.1 trillion in new business value by 2030. Essentially, it provides the basis for a dynamic distributed ledger that can be applied to save time when recording transactions between parties, remove costs associated with intermediaries, and reduce risks of fraud and tampering. This book explores the fundamentals and applications of Blockchain technology. Readers will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, distributed ledger, and the trust model that defines Blockchain technology. They will also be introduced to the basic components of Blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain), its operations (hashing, verification, validation, and consensus model), underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Private and public Blockchain networks similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum will be introduced, as will concepts of Smart Contracts, Proof of Work and Proof of Stack, and cryptocurrency including Facebook’s Libra will be elucidated. Also, the book will address the relationship between Blockchain technology, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation and Quantum Computing.Readers will understand the inner workings and applications of this disruptive technology and its potential impact on all aspects of the business world and society. A look at the future trends of Blockchain Technology will be presented in the book.

Modern cyber systems acquire more emergent system properties, as far as their complexity increases: cyber resilience, controllability, self-organization, proactive cyber security and adaptability. Each of the listed properties is the subject of the cybernetics research and each subsequent feature makes sense only if there is a previous one.Cyber resilience is the most important feature of any cyber system, especially during the transition to the sixth technological stage and related Industry 4.0 technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud and foggy computing, 5G +, IoT/IIoT, Big Data and ETL, Q-computing, Blockchain, VR/AR, etc. We should even consider the cyber resilience as a primary one, because the mentioned systems cannot exist without it. Indeed, without the sustainable formation made of the interconnected components of the critical information infrastructure, it does not make sense to discuss the existence of 4.0 Industry cyber-systems. In case when the cyber security of these systems is mainly focused on the assessment of the incidents' probability and prevention of possible security threats, the cyber resilience is mainly aimed at preserving the targeted behavior and cyber systems' performance under the conditions of known (about 45 %) as well as unknown (the remaining 55 %) cyber attacks.This monograph shows that modern Industry 4.0. Cyber systems do not have the required cyber resilience for targeted performance under heterogeneous mass intruder cyber-attacks. The main reasons include a high cyber system structural and functional complexity, a potential danger of existing vulnerabilities and “sleep” hardware and software tabs, as well as an inadequate efficiency of modern models, methods, and tools to ensure cyber security, reliability, response and recovery.

Many small and medium scale businesses cannot afford to procure expensive cybersecurity tools. In many cases, even after procurement, lack of a workforce with knowledge of the standard architecture of enterprise security, tools are often used ineffectively. The Editors have developed multiple projects which can help in developing cybersecurity solution architectures and the use of the right tools from the opensource software domain. This book has 8 chapters describing these projects in detail with recipes on how to use opensource tooling to obtain standard cyber defense and the ability to do self-penetration testing and vulnerability assessment. This book also demonstrates work related to malware analysis using machine learning and implementation of honeypots, network Intrusion Detection Systems in a security operation center environment. It is essential reading for cybersecurity professionals and advanced students.