Joint Modeling of Hyperledger Fabric and Sybil attack: Petri Net approach

Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is an open-source enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform whose use is accelerating and finding its place in the operations of some of the world’s largest enterprises. It is foreseeable that current and future economic transactions channeled through this technology will be under considerable cyber risk. Regretfully, the present state of academic literature that concerns modeling HLF, understanding the mechanisms of cyberattacks on HLF, and their interactions with HLF systems is sorely lacking. Thus, to address this lack of understanding and contribute to the literature, by using Petri Net mathematical formalism to model the transaction flow of HLF, this work examines the HLF behavior in the context of an ongoing cyberattack via simulation. First, a realistic model of HLF is presented and validated by leveraging parameters obtained from a deployed HLF test network. Second, this paper introduces a novel joint model of HLF under a Sybil attack scenario. The simulations of the Sybil attack span two dimensions: the model’s parameters and the HLF network structure the attack involves. The numerical results of the simulations show for the first time in academic literature, at the transaction level, the impact of Sybil attacks on the HLF network performance. As a novel contribution of this work, the simulations illuminate the interplay between the structure of each, the HLF network, and the Sybil attack in the context of the resilience of HLF and the effectiveness of the Sybil attack.