Trusted operational scenarios - Trust building mechanisms and strategies for electronic marketplaces.

This document presents and describes the trusted operational scenarios, resulting from the research and work carried out in Seamless project. The report presents identified collaboration habits of small and medium enterprises with low e-skills, trust building mechanisms and issues as main enablers of online business relationships on the electronic marketplace, a questionnaire analysis of the level of trust acceptance and necessity of trust building mechanisms, a proposal for the development of different strategies for the different types of trust mechanisms and recommended actions for the SEAMLESS project or other B2B marketplaces.trust building mechanisms, trust, B2B networks, e-marketplaces

An Efficient and Decentralized Blockchain-based Commercial Alternative (Full Version)

While online interactions and exchanges have grown exponentially over the past decade, most commercial infrastructures still operate through centralized protocols, and their success essentially depends on trust between different economic actors. Digital advances such as blockchain technology has led to a massive wave of \textit{Decentralized Ledger Technology} (\textit{DLT}) initiatives, protocols and solutions. This advance makes it possible to implement trustless systems in the real world, which, combined with appropriate economic and participatory incentives, would foster the proper functioning and drive the adoption of a decentralized platform among different actors. This paper describes an alternative to current commercial structures and networks by introducing \textit{Lyzis Labs}, which is is an incentive-driven and democratic protocol designed to support a decentralized online marketplace, based on blockchain technology. The proposal, \textit{Lyzis Marketplace}, allows to connect two or more people in a decentralized and secure way without having to rely on a \textit{Trusted Third Party} (\textit{TTP}) in order to perform physical asset exchanges while mainly providing transparent and fully protected data storage. This approach can potentially lead to the creation of a permissionless, efficient, secure and transparent business environment where each user can gain purchasing and decision-making power by supporting the collective welfare while following their personal interests during their various interactions on the network.Comment: 62 pages, 9 figures, 19 table

Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.Comment: Published in ACM CCS 2017, this is the full version with all appendice

Beyond Bitcoin: Issues in Regulating Blockchain Transactions

The buzz surrounding Bitcoin has reached a fever pitch. Yet in academic legal discussions, disproportionate emphasis is placed on bitcoins (that is, virtual currency), and little mention is made of blockchain technology—the true innovation behind the Bitcoin protocol. Simply, blockchain technology solves an elusive networking problem by enabling “trustless” transactions: value exchanges over computer networks that can be verified, monitored, and enforced without central institutions (for example, banks). This has broad implications for how we transact over electronic networks. This Note integrates current research from leading computer scientists and cryptographers to elevate the legal community’s understanding of blockchain technology and, ultimately, to inform policymakers and practitioners as they consider different regulatory schemes. An examination of the economic properties of a blockchain-based currency suggests the technology’s true value lies in its potential to facilitate more efficient digital-asset transfers. For example, applications of special interest to the legal community include more efficient document and authorship verification, title transfers, and contract enforcement. Though a regulatory patchwork around virtual currencies has begun to form, its careful analysis reveals much uncertainty with respect to these alternative applications

A Descriptive Content Analysis of Trust-Building Measures in B2B Electronic Marketplaces

Because business-to-business (B2B) electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces) facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers, they strive to foster a trustworthy trading environment with a variety of trust-building measures. However, little research has been undertaken to explore trust-building measures used in B2B e-marketplaces, or to determine to what extent these measures are applied in B2B e-marketplaces and how they are applied. Based on reviews of the scholarly, trade, and professional literature on trust in electronic commerce, we identified 11 trust-building measures used to create trust in B2B e-marketplaces. Zucker\u27s trust production theory [1986] was applied to understand how these trust-building measures will enhance participants\u27 trust in buyers and sellers in B2B e-marketplaces or in B2B e-marketplace providers. A descriptive content analysis of 100 B2B e-marketplaces was conducted to survey the current usage of the 11 trust-building measures. Many of the trust-building measures were found to be widely used in the B2B e-marketplaces. However, although they were proven to be effective in building trust-related beliefs in online business environments, several institutional-based trust-building measures, such as escrow services, insurance and third-party assurance seals, are not widely used in B2B e-marketplaces

WebTrust Program for On-Line Privacy, Version 3.0, August 15, 2000; Exposure draft (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants), 2000, August 15

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