Blockchain CBSA – Objective – Ethereum Part 3

6. Ethereum Security

Well, let’s talk about Aetherium blockchain security. Well, we know that Aetherium is a public non permission blockchain. We also know that it’s open to the public. We know that it’s using proof of work and at some point when it gets to the right block number it will change over to a proof estate consensus. Now, Aetherium was originally designed to be a smart contract platform and again, it’s perhaps the most well used smart contract platform out there. With that said, we want to be aware that with smart contracts, for example, these are written in solidity and we also want to be aware that there’s a ledger as well. Now, with the Ethereal ledger it’s really a little different than perhaps what you would see in Hyperledger. For example, it uses essentially a set of trees.

And with the set of trees you could think of trees as being branches and these branches have different sort of shoots off of them. So we have a state tree, a storage tree, transaction tree and a receipt tree. I won’t go into each of these. This is, of course a subject that you may or may not be too concerned with if you’re not a developer. But basically the main thing to get here is that the way the blocks are on the ethernet blockchain they’re going to contain essentially hashes. And these hashes should have, of course, the roots of the current version of the trees in this case, for example, the state tree. And we’ll also have the transactions as well as the other relatively relevant information such as the receipt tree, for example. And then we have, of course, our theory and virtual machine. The Ethereum virtual machine is going to run the smart contracts on the platform.

Basically, contracts are going to be written in solidity and then each instruction in the EVM is going to have to be tied to what’s called a gas value. Now the gas value, as you may know, is going to be essentially an estimate of compute power required to process the transactions. And that smart contract. Again, we know that Ethereum smart contracts run on the virtual machine and we also know that if we want to execute a smart contract we have to include gas. And gas is essentially going to be a fraction of the Ether in most cases.

And this pays for that computer essentially effort that is required to run the code on the EVM. Now, one thing to point out too if you don’t have enough gas you’re not going to be able to execute the EVM smart contracts. Now let’s talk about security controls that can be at least appreciated in Ethereum. There’s really very little you can do to improve security, to be honest. However, let’s talk about what we can do with Ethereum. We know that support for privacy and security is just about nonexistent. In other words, when you make that transaction on Ethereum it’s open for the world to see.

Now, we also know that security features are not directly supported by the ethereum blockchain. You have to generally write them into your smart contract. However, this is going to change eventually. It is planned to support what’s called zero knowledge proofs. One of those is called ZK Snarks, for example, very similar to some other implementations out there, such as Zcash. Let’s go ahead and move on to the next module.

7. Etherscan

I’m over here at the Etherscan website. It’s etherscan IO. This is the ethereum block. Explorer. Now this tool here you want to use to get an idea of the activity on the Ethereum blockchain and also to view transactions that have happened. For example, you can view your own transactions from your own wallet if you so choose. You could also view other transactions that are going on to see what the block rewards are. For example, for example if I go here and go view all this will bring up the basically the block height. This is basically more or less a block ID in a sense. And it identifies where that block number is in that blockchain. Tells you the age of it.

Tells you the TXM transmission numbers, the minor this is basically the minor pool that has mined that specific block. It tells you the gas limit, the price that was essentially requested for gas and then the reward that the miner received. And you can see that most of this is really the same mining tools. They’re all fairly routine, it seems like. And then if you go next, again, you can see that most of these are named these are typically larger mining pools that are doing this. So if you go here again, f two pool Ether mine pretty common to see those two anyways, spark pool. They’re sort of interesting. Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t. And as you see, it’s pretty much the same miners producing value. Now if I go back to the home page you can see that it updates the blocks and everything here and then the transactions. I go over here.

I go look at the transaction number and it’s going to tell me, for example, the timestamp, the block height. And then it basically tells you where it was sent to the value, how much Ether, which was point one Ether. This is about $28 worth of Ethereum. The gas limit was 27 50 essentially. And you could see that was a small transaction. And if you go over here you could see again this is two Ether. So you go over here, that will be a bigger transaction. Two Ether right now is worth about $561. So basically Ethereum is running just under $300 per Ether. So this is AThe Scan. This is the ethereum block. Explorer. Gives you an idea what exactly is going on.

Another way you get to it too, if you remember the MetaMask demo is if I go back here I could go view account on Etherscan. And this is my account here. You can see that this is my MetaMask account. Not my only one, but this is the one I use for playing around and doing classes and demos. So you can see that I had three transactions about 71 days ago, 100 days ago. And you get to that through MetaMask. And again, the way you get to it is over here there’s three little dots there. You just select that. Now, I could also copy my address to the keyboard. I could export my key once again, there’s a couple of ways to get to Etherscan. MetaMask is just one of those as well.

8. Ethernodes

I’m over here at the Ethernodes. org webpage. Now this is a really neat site that pretty much displays to us pretty much geographically where the ethereum nodes are. Now there is a main net and there is a test net and you could see that Google of Maps is having some issues, whatever that is. But if I go here again, it shows me where the test net nodes are. And you go over here, there’s only 18 that are online at the time that have been discovered. There’s nine in the US. And two in Germany, two in France, two in Ireland, so on and so on. And over here, what’s cool is you go ahead and look at the versions of the clients and you can see the clients are listed there. That’s Gap. And this is in Parity. And then OS is Linux, 64 bit. Linux one is not being recognized and then FreeBSD. Now let’s go back to the maintenance net. This is going to be where most of the nodes are given a second. Now you can see that at the time there’s 16,000 plus nodes, over 45% are just in the United States itself. China has the second highest number of nodes at 1956, so they’ve got about 11%. Canada 7%, germany, Russia, United Kingdom, any go view all if you so choose as well.

Now, what’s interesting here is you can see that a lot of the nodes are being taken offline. And why is that? Well, I think because of the fact that the price of ether has dropped so much that it just isn’t making it as profitable. Same thing I’ve noticed with bitcoin, the number of bitcoin nodes that are online, the miners are just not the same. And we’re starting to see basically what I would call a flushing out of the real dedicated nodes. And perhaps that may or may not be the case down the road, who knows? But from a month to month perspective it’s still up 9%, but in a week it went down 12%. Now some of this too could be just as a result of network latency, it could be a power outage where they’re located, it could be any number of things. Again, if I go here to clients, you can see that there’s a lot of different clients that are listed.

So again you can go and play around and see Parity has Gap, right, that’s the client that is utilized for the blockchain, for accessing the client client versions are here. You can see there’s tons of different versions right there. I can’t even count them all. And then OSS again, you can see there, there is some windows, about 957 windows that are 64 bit, running 156, 32 bit it looks like. And you could see so on and so on. But anyways, this is a good little resource just so that you have an idea and you could talk intelligently with your client, that there are 16,000 plus nodes on the main net at this time. Good way to take a look around. Now, if you did want to go drill down the map, the only thing I’m going to warn you about the map is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And it definitely could be your browser. That’s just one thing to pay attention to. I am using basically chrome. That’s usually supported as well. Ie almost never works. But the other browser you could use as well is Firefox.

That usually works pretty well as well. All right, let’s go over here. Let’s go and drill down here. I’m sorry. Yeah, over here. If you go here, you can see that there isn’t too many nodes that are in the middle of the country. It looks like there’s a good amount in Chicago. Looks like there is definitely some in Northern Virginia and DC. So if I go over here, you can see Washington has a few. And then, interestingly enough, ashburn, Virginia. And that would make sense because of the fact that is Data Center Alley. And for those folks that don’t know, ashburn, Virginia is exactly where the European trunk lines pretty much de embark into the United States. So big data center alley there.

And then over here, this is pretty much near looks like Columbia, or is it College Park? And you can see again, a node or two there. I can’t tell. It’s pretty hard to see. But with that said, this is a good tool. Go over to Ethernodes. org and check it out.