Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution

Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed confidentiality-preserving smart-contracts and high scalability. Our prototype (with Tendermint as the consensus layer) achieves example performance of 600x more throughput and 400x less latency at 1000x less cost than the Ethereum mainnet. Another contribution of this paper is that we systematically identify and treat the pitfalls arising from harmonizing TEEs and blockchains. Treated separately, both TEEs and blockchains provide powerful guarantees, but hybridized, though, they engender new attacks. For example, in naive designs, privacy in TEE-backed contracts can be jeopardized by forgery of blocks, a seemingly unrelated attack vector. We believe the insights learned from Ekiden will prove to be of broad importance in hybridized TEE-blockchain systems

(De)coding a technopolity: tethering the civic blockchain to political transformation

This study rests at the intersection of technopolitics, translocal networks and political change. The overall aim of the thesis is to understand, and in turn, influence, the way technology interacts with political transformation. It responds to the fact that social science has thus far neglected to adequately account for and analyze how emerging technologies like blockchain and civic tech influence the way politics is practiced. The main research question guiding the study is how does the design, implementation and use of technopolitical innovations influence the practice of politics. The thesis foregrounds the idea that technopolitical experiments personify a ‘prefigurative politics by design’ i.e. they embody the politics and power structures they want to enable in society. Conducted as part of the EU-funded SUSPLACE project that explores the transformative capacity of sustainable place-shaping practices, the research was predominantly inspired by a hybrid digital ethnography methodology. The thesis confines its focus to three empirical clusters: technopolitical blockchain projects, government-led blockchain projects and place-based civic engagement technologies. The study delineates how differing politico-social imaginaries play a role in the design and implementation of technopolitical projects; addresses contemporary post-political phenomena such as the depoliticization of agency; and identifies the activation of a place-based geography of political action through digitally-mediated municipal networks. It articulates the language and frameworks necessary to analyze these present-day challenges, while simultaneously developing approaches that can be exported to different domains of political activism. Technology is not neutral; but neither are its designers and users. The thesis finds that it is through considerable, deliberate efforts, in conjunction with individual and collective choices, that technopolitical innovations can reframe our socio-economic and political realities. The study demonstrates the emphatic and urgent need for researchers, practitioners, politicians and citizens to collaboratively work on redrawing boundaries of access, empowering the citizenry, creating new forms of organization and re-politicizing the economy. It outlines a transdisciplinary research and practice agenda that aims at not only (de)coding the existing technopolitical innovations, but also (re)coding them to create a more equitable system of politics. The thesis concludes that since coding affordances and constraints in a technopolitical system is shown to regulate political agency and even influence the behavior of citizens, we must devise value-driven technology that incentivizes creating a more equitable political system.&nbsp

Distributed Ledger Technologies and Corruption: The Killer App?

As futurists continue to speculate about DLTs’ seemingly limitless potential, and as pilots begin on a range of potential applications of the technology to anti-corruption efforts, this Article contextualizes these developments and considers DLTs’ big-picture implications. This Article proceeds in five parts. Part II provides a brief background on DLTs: what they are, what they do, and where they originate. Part III positions this discussion within the broader anti-corruption literature and offers a framework for government officials, aid agencies, and reformers considering whether to deploy new technologies in the fight against corruption. Applying that framework to DLTs, Part IV identifies three anti-corruption use cases for which governments should particularly consider DLTs. Part IV also examines some of the key risks in using blockchains to fight corruption and outlines strategies governments can use to mitigate those risks. Part V recommends some short- and long-term steps for governments interested in exploring DLTs. Part VI concludes with a note of caution about the rapidly evolving nature of these technologies.

Giving State to the Stateless: Augmenting Trustworthy Computation with Ledgers

In this work we investigate the problem of achieving secure computation by combining stateless trusted devices with public ledgers. We consider a hybrid paradigm in which a client-side device (such as a co-processor or trusted enclave) performs secure computation, while interacting with a public ledger via a possibly malicious host computer. We explore both the constructive and potentially destructive implications of such systems. We first show that this combination allows for the construction of stateful interactive functionalities (including general computation) even when the device has no persistent storage; this allows us to build sophisticated applications using inexpensive trusted hardware or even pure cryptographic obfuscation techniques. We further show how to use this paradigm to achieve censorship-resistant communication with a network, even when network communications are mediated by a potentially malicious host. Finally we describe a number of practical applications that can be achieved today. These include the synchronization of private smart contracts; rate limited mandatory logging; strong encrypted backups from weak passwords; enforcing fairness in multi-party computation; and destructive applications such as autonomous ransomware, which allows for payments without an online party

Internet of Things From Hype to Reality

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant mindshare, let alone attention, in academia and the industry especially over the past few years. The reasons behind this interest are the potential capabilities that IoT promises to offer. On the personal level, it paints a picture of a future world where all the things in our ambient environment are connected to the Internet and seamlessly communicate with each other to operate intelligently. The ultimate goal is to enable objects around us to efficiently sense our surroundings, inexpensively communicate, and ultimately create a better environment for us: one where everyday objects act based on what we need and like without explicit instructions

Full Text PDF of The JBBA, 11th Issue, May 2023

Full Text PDF of The JBBA, 11th Issue, May 202

Designing and Implementing a Blockchain-based Platform for the Exchange of Peerto-Peer Energy Trading and Modelling Vehicle-to-Grid(V2G) Residential Community

The expansion of renewable energy on the national grid has been a struggle throughout the past decade. Rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) and electric vehicle to Grid (V2G) can function as either load or distributed energy sources. Consequently, presumers can join in a Transactive energy network featuring peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange of excess electricity to enhance the grid load balancing and harmonic filtering performance. The key challenge is keeping track of these transactions and compensating supposing parties. The distributed and unchangeable characteristics of blockchain technology could be utilised to accelerate the ongoing transition to more decentralised and digital energy systems and alleviate some of the challenges the energy sector is now facing. This report presents an experimental design and implementation of a Peer-to-peer blockchain network to exchange electricity energy among participants based on the Ethereum open-source application called Solar Chain App. This demonstration project simulates the P2P Network of the electricity distribution network. A project consists of a primary network and user nodes (user nodes have homeowners and EVs). Homeowners with solar and electric vehicles Participants, assets, and transactions required to establish the blockchain-based network for tracking Buyer and seller output exchanges are described, and the smart contract, use cases, and implementation. The main purpose is to design a p2p platform that maximize renewable energy Usage and minimize the daily cost of household electricity consumption

Data, Debt & Daemons: Systemic Asymmetries on Spaceship Earth

Day by day, the rate at which we create new data increases exponentially. Our capacity to learn cannot keep up. We are tiny members of a vast universal network, incapable of discerning cause and effect. Instead, we develop simplified narratives, leaving ourselves misguided yet complacent. The information management trade of both physical and intellectual property has become more vital to global economies than ever, replacing physical resources and manufacturing. Through our deepening reliance on specialization, we forfeit agency over our own homes while accruing unprecedented debt. Housing costs have risen dramatically compared to wages, despite reportedly successful economies. Citizens were supposed to have the ability to participate in financial markets using their property as collateral. This seduced many into the ideologies of unregulated capitalism. However, by the 21st century, these systems had become unrecognizable mutilations of their intended designs. The momentum we have gathered in the past century has thrust us on an unsustainable trajectory we have little hope of predicting. We laid the foundation for Western economic dominance with technology, monetary policy, and globalization, but we did so using incentive structures that exacerbated wealth inequality. These systems integrate digital technology into both our physical and virtual spaces, operating on invisible planes that bypass our senses. The radical novelty of computers has entangled us in niche engineered concepts that few understand. They create a lack of accountability in Big Tech that policy-makers are ill-prepared for. We cannot ensure an equitable distribution of the leverage or stakes when we entrust brokers, politicians, traders, and captains of industry to make complex decisions for us without bearing the risks of their consequences. Our long-term welfare, including our future habitation on this planet, is not visceral enough to force effective reform. Both our physical and our digital spaces are designed, built, evaluated, and monitored on asymmetric principles, causing disasters that future generations and the least fortunate always pay for. How did we normalize this moral hazard? How can digital systems born out of frustration with modern policy combat these issues, without disrupting the benefits of a techno-utopia? How can they promote efficiency, security, and transparency in the spaces we call home