Ripping the Fabric: Attacks and Mitigations on Hyperledger Fabric

Ahaan Dabholkar, Vishal Saraswat

Abstract: In this paper, we take a closer look at the attack surface of permissioned blockchains by focusing on Hyperledger Fabric and present scenarios where the assumptions of trust could lead to possible attacks on an organization’s ledger. We systematically examine each participant and treating it as a malicious entity look at the attacks possible on the system as a whole. With the global shift in adopting blockchains as vehicles of trust, a collection of such scenarios would be useful to organizations using Fabric to implement their own Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), as it would highlight the possible misuse cases of the platform. It would also help fellow researchers by presenting a primitive idea of the possible attacks and promote further research in preventing them.