2,549 research outputs found
On Using Blockchains for Safety-Critical Systems
Innovation in the world of today is mainly driven by software. Companies need
to continuously rejuvenate their product portfolios with new features to stay
ahead of their competitors. For example, recent trends explore the application
of blockchains to domains other than finance. This paper analyzes the
state-of-the-art for safety-critical systems as found in modern vehicles like
self-driving cars, smart energy systems, and home automation focusing on
specific challenges where key ideas behind blockchains might be applicable.
Next, potential benefits unlocked by applying such ideas are presented and
discussed for the respective usage scenario. Finally, a research agenda is
outlined to summarize remaining challenges for successfully applying
blockchains to safety-critical cyber-physical systems
Tree-Chain: A Fast Lightweight Consensus Algorithm for IoT Applications
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications
including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including
decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional
blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have
limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose
tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels
of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator
of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant
characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii)
blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular
consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces
parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding
transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is
runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving
near real-time transaction settlement
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