Enhancing blockchain security: a novel approach to integrated malware defence mechanisms

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel integrated hybrid malware attack detection algorithm, focusing on enhancing cybersecurity within blockchain systems by addressing the prevalent challenges of Byzantine fault tolerance, Reentrancy, and DDOS attacks. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to safeguarding blockchain technology, a cornerstone for secure, decentralized digital transactions, against sophisticated malware threats. Current cybersecurity solutions frequently fall short of offering a complete defense mechanism, making it difficult to effectively combat a variety of dynamic malware attacks at the same time. Thus, the main objective of this research is to provide a hybrid framework that combines DDOS attack prevention, reentrancy attack detection, and Byzantine fault tolerance detection into a single, cohesive architecture. The proposed hybrid framework encompasses a detailed algorithmic approach integrating SHA-256 and DSA to analyze the aforementioned three malware attacks. A hybrid model combining these algorithms, implemented in one block, has been developed to mitigate malicious activity. These measures aim to improve computational complexity and expedite execution within the network of nodes. To test the efficacy of the proposed framework, the approach is tested on the NSL-KDD dataset to analyze the malicious activities. The performance analysis of the proposed frameworks presents a recall and F1 score of 73 and .68 respectively. Furthermore, for efficient mitigation, the time and space complexity analysis is performed on proposed algorithms for attack analysis, which resulted in a combination of constant and linear time complexity operations. The findings reveal that the proposed algorithm successfully identifies and mitigates the targeted malware attacks and maintains optimal performance in terms of time and space complexity. Specifically, the algorithm showcases linear and constant time complexities across different attack vectors, ensuring swift and scalable defense capabilities. This research’s contribution to the cybersecurity field is significant, offering a robust, scalable solution that enhances the resilience of blockchain networks against a broad spectrum of malware attacks.