Distributed Ledger Cybersecurity Resilience Framework in a Post Quantum Cryptography Era

Robert Campbell

Abstract

Mission-critical infrastructures and systems are increasingly adopting enterprise blockchain and distributed ledger technologies without fully understanding the vulnerability, threat and risk environment that exists in today’s environment. Further; organizations are less prepared for the coming ominous threat from Quantum Computers (QC). In 2018, Gartner revealed that Quantum Computing (QC) is a digital disruption that organizations may not be prepared for and CIOs may not see coming. Cyber-attacks on enterprise distributed ledgers can adversely impact intellectual property, healthcare information, personally-identifying information, human safety, and the reputation and trust of organizations. Enterprise Distributed Ledgers are complex systems that incorporate cryptography, fault-tolerance, and distributed consensus and its cybersecurity is not well understood in a systematic and thorough way. Standard network defenses and threat detection are not enough thwarted adversaries from exploiting vulnerable distributed ledgers in a PQC environment. This threat environment requires a new Cyber Resilient approach that is built-in and accounts for the arrival of large-scale, fault-tolerant QCs to be immediately implemented into enterprise blockchain deployments. To date there are no known public plans or strategies to incorporate Cyber-Resilience into enterprise distributed ledgers in the Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) era. This research proposes an enterprise distributed ledger Cyber Resilient framework that can be used to analyzing the security and risk of enterprise distributed ledger systems. Specifically, the author proposes metrics, analysis methodologies and performance parameters to be included in an enterprise distributed ledger framework that is measurable, testable, and affordable in the PQC era