Using Blockchains to Protect Critical Infrastructures: a Comparison Between Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric

The monitoring and protection of critical infrastructures, especially the ones involving physical assets (e.g., dams, nuclear energy facilities, governmental buildings), constitute a challenging problem. The failure and collapse of these infrastructures can cause untold consequences. Recent works have proposed blockchains as a tool to improve monitoring systems in different critical infrastructures. However, most previous works lack on presenting a more in-depth discussion about how to implement these solutions. In this paper, we develop a practical approach. We propose a comprehensive framework that describes how to implement a blockchain-based system to monitor and protect critical infrastructures. We implement our framework in two distinct blockchain platforms: Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. We compare both implementations and discuss their differences in terms of performance, easiness of development, security, privacy, complexity, and costs. We believe that our results can be valuable for professionals interested in applying blockchain-based solutions to protect critical infrastructures.