The fragility of decentralised trustless socio-technical systems

The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and even governments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typically focus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensus algorithm. Here, we highlight the importance of considering trustless platforms within the broader ecosystem that includes social and communication networks. As an example, we analyse the flash-crash observed on 21st June 2017 in the Ethereum platform and show that a major phenomenon of social coordination led to a catastrophic cascade of events across several interconnected systems. We propose the concept of “emergent centralisation” to describe situations where a single system becomes critically important for the functioning of the whole ecosystem, and argue that such situations are likely to become more and more frequent in interconnected socio-technical systems. We anticipate that the systemic approach we propose will have implications for future assessments of trustless systems and call for the attention of policy-makers on the fragility of our interconnected and rapidly changing world

A Distributed Ledger based infrastructure for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are proposed as an efficient way to improve performances in transportation systems applying information, communication, and sensor technologies to vehicles and transportation infrastructures. The great amount of vehicles produced data, indeed, can potentially lead to a revolution in ITS development, making them more powerful multifunctional systems. To this purpose, the use of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) can provide comfort and security to drivers through reliable communications. Meanwhile, distributed ledgers have emerged in recent years radically evolving the way that we used to consider finance, trust in communication and even renewing the concept of data sharing and allowing to establish autonomous, secured, trusted and decentralized systems. In this work an ITS infrastructure based on the combination of different emerging Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and VANETs is proposed, resulting in a transparent, self-managed and self-regulated system, that is not fully managed by a central authority. The intended design is focused on the user ability to use any type of DLT-based application and to transact using Smart Contracts, but also on the access control and verification over user’s vehicle produced data. Users "smart" transactions are achieved thanks to the Ethereum blockchain, widely used for distributed trusted computation, whilst data sharing and data access is possible thanks to the use of IOTA, a DLT fully designed to operate in the Internet of Things landscape, and IPFS, a protocol and a network that allows to work in a distributed file system. The aim of this thesis is to create a ready-to-work infrastructure based on the hypothesis that every user in the ITS must be able to participate. To evaluate the proposal, an infrastructure implementation is used in different real world use cases, common in Smart Cities and related to the ITS, and performance measurements are carried out for DLTs used

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems

Fake news: a technological approach to proving the origins of content, using blockchains

In this paper, we introduce a prototype of an innovative technology for proving the origins of captured digital media. In an era of fake news, when someone shows us a video or picture of some event, how can we trust its authenticity? It seems the public no longer believe that traditional media is a reliable reference of fact, perhaps due, in part, to the onset of many diverse sources of conflicting information, via social media. Indeed, the issue of ‘fake’ reached a crescendo during the 2016 US Presidential Election, when the winner, Donald Trump, claimed that the New York Times was trying to discredit him by pushing disinformation. Current research into overcoming the problem of fake news does not focus on establishing the ownership of media resources used in such stories - the blockchain-based application introduced in this article is technology that is capable of indicating the authenticity of digital media. Put simply; by using the trust mechanisms of blockchain technology, the tool can show, beyond doubt, the provenance of any source of digital media, including images used out of context in attempts to mislead. Although the application is an early prototype and its capability to find fake resources is Peer Review Only/Not for Distributionsomewhat limited, we outline future improvements that would overcome such limitations. Furthermore, we believe our application (and its use of blockchain technology and standardised metadata), introduces a novel approach to overcoming falsities in news reporting and the provenance of media resources used therein. However, while our application has the potential to be able to verify the originality of media resources, we believe technology is only capable of providing a partial solution to fake news. That is because it is incapable of proving the authenticity of a news story as a whole. We believe that takes human skills