On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

Probabilistic micropayments with transferability

Micropayments are one of the challenges in cryptocurrencies. The problems in realizing micropayments in the blockchain are the low throughput and the high blockchain transaction fee. As a solution, decentralized probabilistic micropayment has been proposed. The winning amount is registered in the blockchain, and the tickets are issued to be won with probability $p$, which allows us to aggregate approximately $\frac{1}{p}$ transactions into one. Unfortunately, existing solutions do not allow for ticket transferability, and the smaller $p$, the more difficult it is to use them in the real world. We propose a novel decentralized probabilistic micropayment Transferable Scheme. It allows tickets to be transferable among users. By allowing tickets to be transferable, we can make $p$ smaller. We also propose a novel Proportional Fee Scheme. This is a scheme where each time a ticket is transferred, a portion of the blockchain transaction fee will be charged. With the proportional fee scheme, users will have the advantage of sending money with a smaller fee than they would generally send through the blockchain. For example, sending one dollar requires only ten cents

Secure Mobile Payments Without Network Connectivity

Mobile payments depend on the availability of internet connectivity, e.g., to enable a centralized service to authenticate a payment. This disclosure describes techniques to enable peer-to-peer mobile payments in the absence of a network. A user has an initial amount, referred to as the balance, that is transferred to their mobile device from a balance provider, e.g., a financial institution. The balance is digitally signed by both the user and the balance provider. To transact in the absence of a network, peer users perform a contactless payment as follows. The receiver of funds verifies the availability of funds by examining the prior, authenticated, transaction records of the sender. A transaction record including the transaction amount is created and made immutable and secure using cryptographic techniques. When either the sender or receiver regains network connectivity, the transaction is settled with the balance provider. Double-spend attempts by a malicious sender are forestalled by enabling secure maintenance of the true balance on a sender’s device (even in the absence of a network), and by enabling the receiver to settle with the sender’s balance provider on the basis of an authenticated transaction record

Resilient payment systems

There have been decades of attempts to evolve or revolutionise the traditional financial system, but not all such efforts have been transformative or even successful. From Chaum’s proposals in the 1980s for private payment systems to micropayments, previous attempts failed to take off for a variety of reasons, including non-existing markets, or issues pertaining to usability, scalability and performance, resilience against failure, and complexity of protocols. Towards creating more resilient payment systems, we investigated issues related to security engineering in general, and payment systems in particular. We identified that network coverage, central points of failure, and attacks may cripple system performance. The premise of our research is that offline capabilities are required to produce resilience in critical systems. We focus on issues related to network problems and attacks, system resilience, and scalability by introducing the ability to process payments offline without relying on the availability of network coverage; a lack of network coverage renders some payment services unusable for their customers. Decentralising payment verification, and outsourcing some operations to users, alleviates the burden of contacting centralised systems to process every transaction. Our secondary goal is to minimise the cost of providing payment systems, so providers can cut transaction fees. Moreover, by decentralising payment verification that can be performed offline, we increase system resilience, and seamlessly maintain offline operations until a system is back online. We also use tamper-resistant hardware to tackle usability issues, by minimising cognitive overhead and helping users to correctly handle critical data, minimising the risks of data theft and tampering. We apply our research towards extending financial inclusion efforts, since the issues discussed above must be solved to extend mobile payments to the poorest demographics. More research is needed to integrate online payments, offline payments, and delay-tolerant networking. This research extends and enhances not only payment systems, but other electronically-enabled services from pay-as-you-go solar panels to agricultural subsidies and payments from aid donors. We hope that this thesis is helpful for researchers, protocol designers, and policy makers interested in creating resilient payment systems by assisting them in financial inclusion efforts

An architecture for distributed ledger-based M2M auditing for Electric Autonomous Vehicles

Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

TinyEVM: Off-Chain Smart Contracts on Low-Power IoT Devices

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of devices ranging from simple sensors to smart-phones will participate in billions of micropayments. However, current centralized solutions are unable to handle a massive number of micropayments from untrusted devices.Blockchains are promising technologies suitable for solving some of these challenges.Particularly, permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin have drawn the attention of the research community.However, the increasingly large-scale deployments of blockchain reveal some of their scalability limitations. Prominent proposals to scale the payment system include off-chain protocols such as payment channels. However, the leading proposals assume powerful nodes with an always-on connection and frequent synchronization. These assumptions require in practice significant communication, memory, and computation capacity, whereas IoT devices face substantial constraints in these areas. Existing approaches also do not capture the logic and process of IoT, where applications need to process locally collected sensor data to allow for full use of IoT micro-payments.In this paper, we present TinyEVM, a novel system to generate and execute off-chain smart contracts based on sensor data.TinyEVM\u27s goal is to enable IoT devices to perform micro-payments and, at the same time, address the device constraints.We investigate the trade-offs of executing smart contracts on low-power IoT devices using TinyEVM.We test our system with 7,000 publicly verified smart contracts, where TinyEVM achieves to deploy 93 % of them without any modification.Finally, we evaluate the execution of off-chain smart contracts in terms of run-time performance, energy, and memory requirements on IoT devices.Notably, we find that low-power devices can deploy a smart contract in 215 ms on average, and they can complete an off-chain payment in 584 ms on average