What are the latest security advances in crypto?

Cryptocurrency is a revolutionary technology challenging the political and social underpinnings of society as a secure method of online payment that shuns centralised banking while offering user anonymity. Regardless of the fame of blockchain-powered transactions, any crypto user or investor would ask if cryptocurrency is as safe as Fort Knox. 

Due to the growing threat of hacks and cyber-attacks against both crypto exchanges and individuals, cryptocurrency security has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. In this piece, we’ll learn about cryptocurrency security, its importance, the biggest security advances, and more.

What is cryptocurrency security?

Cryptocurrency security is one of the most important foundations in the crypto space. Many traders do not necessarily know how to buy, sell and store safely, their Bitcoin, Ethereum and other altcoins. Moreover, there are dubious cryptocurrency traders and projects. For context, more than $12 billion has been lost so far this year due to DeFi exploitation, according to Elliptic.

This is where cryptocurrency security comes in as a foundation for safe and secure transactions, further implying that a flawed cryptocurrency system would become volatile, lack trust and ultimately become unsustainable. 

Why is security important to cryptocurrency?

The present state of the market necessitate the need for a transparent and more secure transactions. More so, given that it is a decentralised system that is transparent and trackable, the cryptocurrency industry cannot function optimally without security. 

Blockchain technology is commonly used to create cryptocurrencies, as well as to ensure its secure transactions. While several security measures are in place in blockchain technology, this does not mean cryptocurrencies are un-hackable. 

Several high-dollar hacks have cost cryptocurrency start-ups heavily. Hackers hit Coincheck and BitGrail to the tune of $534 million and $195 million respectively, making them two of the biggest cryptocurrency hacks of 2018.

Many cyber-attacks are going on in the cryptocurrency space necessitating the deployment of a rock-solid security apparatus for cryptocurrency to thrive. 

Cryptocurrency Security Standard

In the crypto space, Cryptocurrency Security Standard or CCSS was introduced in 2014 to provide guidance specific to the secure management of cryptos. Cryptocurrency Security Standard is a set of requirements for all information systems that make use of cryptocurrencies, including exchanges, web applications, and cryptocurrency storage solutions.

CCSS is an open standard designed to augment standard information security practices and to complement existing standards (ISO 27001, PCI DSS, etc.) in order to protect cryptocurrency information against unauthorised data access, sensitive data loss, and data breaches.

CCSS covers a list of 10 security aspects of an information system that stores, transacts with, or accepts cryptocurrencies. CCSS is currently the go-to security standard for any organisation that handles and manages crypto wallets as part of its business logic.

Biggest security advances in crypto for 2021

1.Ethereum 2.0: Ethereum 2.0 is an upgraded version of Ethereum cryptocurrency which is developed to improve the scalability, speed, and efficiency of Ethereum. Ethereum also adds more security in its upgrade of Ethereum 2.0. While most PoS networks require a few validators, resulting in decreased network security, Ethereum 2.0 needs a large set of validators, making it more decentralised and safer.

2. Cryptocurrency ETF: A crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a security designed to track a cryptocurrency, an index, sector, commodity or other types of assets. Unlike the regular cryptocurrencies that are traded on crypto exchanges, the crypto ETFs are bought and sold on stock exchanges like regular stocks. Since they’re traded to traditional exchanges, all ETFs are highly regulated and this makes them safer and convenient. 

3. Detection for Selfish Mining Attacks: Selfish mining attacks may cause the loss of mining power, especially those of honest participants, which brings great security challenges to the Bitcoin system. To tackle this is ForkDec, a high-accuracy system, created by computer scientists, for selfish mining detection based on the fully connected neural network, to effectively deter selfish attackers.

4. Data Privacy Protection Scheme: To tackle attackers using data mining algorithms to obtain and analyse users’ private data, supervised energy transaction data privacy protection scheme is being championed by experts to trade off the supervision of energy transaction data by the supervisory authority and the privacy protection of transaction data.

Ultimately, security is undeniably an integral foundation especially when it comes to financial transactions. Given that money stolen from cryptocurrency wallets is usually unrecoverable, providing necessary confidence that cryptocurrencies are managed by the best security standards is vital to every investor. Security is the biggest benefit of blockchain for crypto and it’s constantly improving.