A taxonomy study on securing Blockchain-based Industrial applications: an overview, application perspectives, requirements, attacks, countermeasures, and open issues

Blockchain technology has taken on a leading position in today’s industrial applications by providing salient features and showing significant performance since its beginning. Blockchain began its journey from the concept of cryptocurrency and is now part of a range of core applications to achieve resilience and automation between various tasks. However, with the integration of Blockchain technology into different industrial applications, many application designs, security, and privacy challenges present themselves, posing serious threats to users and their data. Although several approaches have been proposed to address the specific application, security and privacy challenges of targeted applications with limited security enhancement solutions, there is still a need for a comprehensive research study on the application design, security and privacy challenges, and requirements of Blockchain-based industrial applications, along with possible security threats and countermeasures. This study presents a comprehensive and state-of-the-art survey of Blockchain-based Industry 4.0 applications, focusing on potential application design, security and privacy requirements, as well as corresponding attacks on Blockchain systems with potential countermeasures. We also analyse and provide the classification of security and privacy techniques used in these applications to enhance the advancement of security features. Furthermore, we highlight some open issues of integrating Blockchain technology into industrial applications that help design secure Blockchain-based applications as future directions.