Mastering blockchain security’s backbone: new Challenge category 

Understand how blockchain works and critical security aspects with a set of new, curated Challenges.

Part of the Hack The Box (HTB) mission is to provide our community with constantly up-to-date content, following the latest trends and threats. We are now excited to announce the introduction of a new Challenge category focusing on blockchain technology, powered by HackenProof.

In today's rapidly advancing technological landscape, security has become an increasingly crucial aspect, particularly with the growing popularity of blockchain. With the involvement of a large amount of funds (with a market size value of $11B in 2022 and projected to grow to $469B by 2030) and the potential for significant financial losses, ensuring the robustness and integrity of smart contracts have become fundamental.

This new set of cybersecurity upskilling content will address prominent Web3 concerns and vulnerabilities that affect developers, corporations, and users. What is blockchain (in a nutshell) A blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, is an online database that’s popularly used for cryptocurrency transactions. The database stores digital information in blocks and in chronological order. Once a block is full, it’s linked and locked to the rest of the full blocks in the database, creating a chain. An empty block is then added to the end of the chain to record new information.

In simpler terms, we can think of blockchain technology as a paper ledger book, which is used to record transactions. Once one page is full, you must flip to the next blank page to continue recording information, and so on. In the case of a blockchain, once a block is filled and locked into the chain, that block can no longer be changed.

One of the most important principles of this technology is the so-called Blockchain Trilemma: security, decentralization, and scalability. Security refers to the integration of a complete risk management system. Trust in transactions is ensured through the core principles of a blockchain security framework, which are consensus, cryptography, and decentralization. There are three main types of blockchains, which can be categorized into (1) Private, (2) Public, and (3) Consortium. Decentralization refers to the dispersion of supervision and decision-making power from a central governing body to individual entities. Every new transaction that takes place requires verification before creating its block and adding it to the chain. The decentralized system makes sure that control over the blockchain is distributed across each individual, not in the hands of a specific group or individual.