Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things
TL;DR: The conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
Abstract: Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around blockchains, we examine whether they make a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts—scripts that reside on the blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing, time-consuming workflows. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
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TL;DR: In this paper , the authors explored the integration of sustainability across complex multi-tier supply networks through the utilization of blockchain technology and found that blockchain can enhance suppliers' visibility and increase suppliers' predictability and create robust sustainable supply networks.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Global supply networks encompass many inter-connected suppliers. Many of these suppliers are unpredictable and beyond the direct realm of the company, making the management of sustainability a difficult task. This research attempts to put forth a profound exploration of the integration of sustainability across complex multi-tier supply networks through the utilization of blockchain technology. The research includes a selected literature review compromising well-cited research that focuses on multi-tier supply networks and blockchain technology. The findings suggest that blockchain can enhance suppliers’ visibility. Managers will have increased transparency and traceability of their global supply networks, which will eventually reduce information asymmetry and limit opportunistic behaviors. Furthermore, the connectivity and rapid/immutable sustainable information sharing features associated with blockchain increase suppliers’ predictability and create robust sustainable supply networks. Despite the potential benefits enabled by the technology, the research highlights some vital complexities that may obstruct the adoption of the technology across multi-tier supply networks.
19 citations
07 Jun 2020
TL;DR: Results showed that blockchain enabled 6G business can be built on novel business opportunities, value generation and competitive advantage that have positive strategic consequences on scalability, replicability and sustainability.
Abstract: Future 6G scenarios in 2030 envision society that will be data-driven, enabled by near-instant and unlimited wireless connectivity to intelligence. This calls for a multidisciplinary approach and a re-imagining of how we create, deliver and consume network resources, data and services. This development will change the traditional business models and ecosystem roles, as well as open the market for new stakeholders like micro-operators, edge cloud operators and resource brokers. This paper discusses unprecedented challenges of enabling and stimulating multiple stakeholders to have a more active participation in the future 6G ecosystem and gives a brief outline of key implications of blockchain technologies for related business model transformations. The research extends the existing archetypes of closed and supply focused mobile broadband business models and proposes the novel open ecosystem-focused scenario in which value configuration is leveraging distributed ledger technologies. This expands the architecture from centralized innovation and transaction platforms towards decentralization without a focal resource-orchestrating entity. Results showed that blockchain enabled 6G business can be built on novel business opportunities, value generation and competitive advantage that have positive strategic consequences on scalability, replicability and sustainability.
19 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...The utilization of cryptography in the blockchain ensures the authoritativeness behind all transactions [47] as information on every completed transaction is shared and made available to all nodes....
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...Furthermore, the smart contract enables automated workflows that are complex and involve multi-step and distributed processes [47]....
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19 citations
TL;DR: A systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective and identifies four key issues, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues.
Abstract: An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided.
19 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...• Internet of Thing and smart property [12]: there are billions of nodes that are sharing data between each other through the Internet....
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...In [12], the authors discussed how the combination of blockchain-based smart contracts with the Internet of Thing could be powerful in terms of facilitating the sharing of services....
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TL;DR: ChainFaaS is an open, public, blockchain-based serverless platform that takes advantage of personal computers’ computational capacity to run serverless tasks and would reduce the need for building new data centers with a positive impact on the environment.
Abstract: Due to the rapid increase in the total amount of data generated in the world, the need for more computational resources is also increasing dramatically. This trend results in huge data centers and massive server farms being built around the world, which have a negative impact on global carbon emissions. On the other hand, there are many underutilized personal computers around the world that can be used towards distributed computing. To better understand the capacity of personal computers, we have conducted a survey that aims to find their unused computational power. The results indicate that the typical CPU utilization of a personal computer is only 24.5% and, on average, a personal computer is only used 4.5 hours per day. This shows a significant computational potential that can be used towards distributed computing. In this paper, we introduce ChainFaaS with the motivation to use the computational capacity of personal computers as well as to improve developers' experience of internet-based computing services by reducing their costs, enabling transparency, and providing reliability. ChainFaaS is an open, public, blockchain-based serverless platform that takes advantage of personal computers' computational capacity to run serverless tasks. If a substantial number of personal computers were connected to this platform, some tasks could be offloaded from data centers. As a result, the need for building new data centers would be reduced with a positive impact on the environment. We have proposed the design of ChainFaaS, and then implemented and evaluated a prototype of this platform to show its feasibility.
19 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...Participants can trigger these contracts to use their functionalities [28]....
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References
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TL;DR: The Albanian Generals Problem as mentioned in this paper is a generalization of Dijkstra's dining philosophers problem, where two generals have to come to a common agreement on whether to attack or retreat, but can communicate only by sending messengers who might never arrive.
Abstract: I have long felt that, because it was posed as a cute problem about philosophers seated around a table, Dijkstra’s dining philosopher’s problem received much more attention than it deserves. (For example, it has probably received more attention in the theory community than the readers/writers problem, which illustrates the same principles and has much more practical importance.) I believed that the problem introduced in [41] was very important and deserved the attention of computer scientists. The popularity of the dining philosophers problem taught me that the best way to attract attention to a problem is to present it in terms of a story. There is a problem in distributed computing that is sometimes called the Chinese Generals Problem, in which two generals have to come to a common agreement on whether to attack or retreat, but can communicate only by sending messengers who might never arrive. I stole the idea of the generals and posed the problem in terms of a group of generals, some of whom may be traitors, who have to reach a common decision. I wanted to assign the generals a nationality that would not offend any readers. At the time, Albania was a completely closed society, and I felt it unlikely that there would be any Albanians around to object, so the original title of this paper was The Albanian Generals Problem. Jack Goldberg was smart enough to realize that there were Albanians in the world outside Albania, and Albania might not always be a black hole, so he suggested that I find another name. The obviously more appropriate Byzantine generals then occurred to me. The main reason for writing this paper was to assign the new name to the problem. But a new paper needed new results as well. I came up with a simpler way to describe the general 3n+1-processor algorithm. (Shostak’s 4-processor algorithm was subtle but easy to understand; Pease’s generalization was a remarkable tour de force.) We also added a generalization to networks that were not completely connected. (I don’t remember whose work that was.) I also added some discussion of practical implementation details.
5,208 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city are shown to agree upon a common battle plan using only oral messages, if and only if more than two-thirds of the generals are loyal; so a single traitor can confound two loyal generals.
Abstract: Reliable computer systems must handle malfunctioning components that give conflicting information to different parts of the system. This situation can be expressed abstractly in terms of a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city. Communicating only by messenger, the generals must agree upon a common battle plan. However, one or more of them may be traitors who will try to confuse the others. The problem is to find an algorithm to ensure that the loyal generals will reach agreement. It is shown that, using only oral messages, this problem is solvable if and only if more than two-thirds of the generals are loyal; so a single traitor can confound two loyal generals. With unforgeable written messages, the problem is solvable for any number of generals and possible traitors. Applications of the solutions to reliable computer systems are then discussed.
4,901 citations
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TL;DR: It is shown that, without a logically centralized authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of resource parity and coordination among entities.
Abstract: Large-scale peer-to-peer systems face security threats from faulty or hostile remote computing elements. To resist these threats, many such systems employ redundancy. However, if a single faulty entity can present multiple identities, it can control a substantial fraction of the system, thereby undermining this redundancy. One approach to preventing these "Sybil attacks" is to have a trusted agency certify identities. This paper shows that, without a logically centralized authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of resource parity and coordination among entities.
4,816 citations
"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers background in this paper
...Because of the Sybil attack [15], consensus in public networks is costly...
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...anyone can join though, this would be catastrophic because of the Sybil attack [15]: a single entity could join with multiple identities, get multiple votes, and thus influence the network to favor this entity’s interests....
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22 Feb 1999
TL;DR: A new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults that works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude.
Abstract: This paper describes a new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults. We believe that Byzantinefault-tolerant algorithms will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior. Whereas previous algorithms assumed a synchronous system or were too slow to be used in practice, the algorithm described in this paper is practical: it works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude. We implemented a Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS service using our algorithm and measured its performance. The results show that our service is only 3% slower than a standard unreplicated NFS.
3,562 citations
"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers background or methods in this paper
...5If more than 3f + 1 nodes are used, then the quorum thresholds listed in [26] may lead to forks....
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...Tendermint vs PBFT—Tendermint....
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...Sieve [38], a mechanism used in the HyperLedger Fabric project, augments the PBFT algorithm [26] by adding speculative execution and verification phases, inspired by the execute-verify architecture presented in [39]....
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...Tendermint [32] provides BFT tolerance and is similar to the PBFT algorithm; however it provides a tighter guarantee with regards to the results returned to the client when more than one third of the nodes are faulty, and allows for a dynamically changing set of set of validators, and leaders that can be rotated in a round-robin manner, among other optimizations [33]....
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...PBFT works on the assumption that less than one third of the nodes are faulty (f ), which is why say that it requires at least5 3f + 1 nodes....
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Proceedings Article•
19 Jun 2014TL;DR: Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log that separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered.
Abstract: Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log. It produces a result equivalent to (multi-)Paxos, and it is as efficient as Paxos, but its structure is different from Paxos; this makes Raft more understandable than Paxos and also provides a better foundation for building practical systems. In order to enhance understandability, Raft separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered. Results from a user study demonstrate that Raft is easier for students to learn than Paxos. Raft also includes a new mechanism for changing the cluster membership, which uses overlapping majorities to guarantee safety.
1,811 citations
"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers methods in this paper
...popular Raft algorithm [30], is used as a consensus mechanism in Juno [31]....
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