Collaborative Cybersecurity Using Blockchain: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey addresses the challenge of building trust-enabled, collaborative cybersecurity across organizations by evaluating blockchain-enabled approaches. It conducts a cross-domain, structured literature review of 71 studies from 2016–2023, examining applications, domains, technologies, and consensus choices such as $PoW$, $PoS$, and $PBFT$. Key findings show that DDoS defense, intrusion detection, and secure data sharing are the primary use cases, private/permissioned blockchains with heterogeneous technologies prevail, and the research landscape is fragmented with no dominant groups or venues. The authors provide guidelines for selecting blockchain type and consensus for specific use cases and outline open issues like scalability, interoperability, regulatory compliance, and self-sovereign identities to accelerate practical adoption.

Abstract

Collaborative cybersecurity relies on organizations sharing information to boost security, but trust management is a key concern. Decentralized solutions like distributed ledgers, particularly blockchain, are crucial for eliminating single points of failure. However, the existing literature on blockchain-based collaborative cybersecurity is limited, lacking comprehensive insights. This paper addresses this gap by surveying blockchain's role in collaborative cybersecurity from 2016 to 2023. It explores various applications, trends, and the evolution of blockchain technology, focusing on access control, data validation policies, underlying tech, and consensus mechanisms. A key finding is the fragmentation of the field with no dominant research group or venue. Many recent projects poorly select consensus protocols for their blockchain. To aid researchers and practitioners, this paper offers guidelines for choosing the right blockchain for specific purposes and highlights open research areas and lessons learned from past blockchain applications in collaborative cybersecurity, encouraging further exploration in this field.

Figures (17)

• Figure 1: Blockchain model.
• Figure 2: Number of papers per year.
• Figure 3: Approaches per application per year.
• Figure 4: DDoS mitigation using the consortium archetype.
• Figure 5: DDoS mitigation using the contractual archetype.