Towards Secure Blockchain-Based E-Wallets: A Performance and Security Evaluation

Abstract

Blockchain-based e-wallet systems offer stronger auditability and tamper resistance than fully centralized architectures; however, the choice of consensus mechanism directly affects transaction performance. This paper presents a blockchain-based e-wallet application that employs AES and RSA to secure transaction data before recording it on a permissioned Hyperledger Besu network. The study performs a comparative evaluation of both encryption algorithms in terms of security and performance, while also assessing the performance of three consensus mechanisms, namely IBFT 2.0, QBFT, and Clique, across 50 transaction trials for each mechanism. The system architecture separates off-chain operational storage from encrypted on-chain transaction records, where AES and RSA encryption is applied to protect transaction data prior to blockchain submission. Experimental results show that Clique achieves the lowest mean transaction latency (4,113.56 ms) with the smallest standard deviation (568.47 ms), whereas IBFT 2.0 (6,991.68 ms) and QBFT (6,933.25 ms) exhibit bimodal latency distributions caused by block interval patterns. For transaction retrieval and decryption, all three consensus mechanisms perform similarly, with mean total processing times of 30.09 ms, 33.88 ms, and 32.88 ms for IBFT 2.0, QBFT, and Clique, respectively. RSA encryption and decryption introduce negligible overhead, requiring less than 1 ms for encryption and less than 9 ms for decryption. These findings suggest that Clique provides more consistent throughput for e-wallet applications, whereas IBFT 2.0 and QBFT offer Byzantine fault tolerance at the cost of higher and less predictable transaction latency.