Interoperable Blockchains for Highly-Integrated Supply Chains in Collaborative Manufacturing

Abstract

Blockchain technology plays a pivotal role in the undergoing fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. It is considered a tremendous boost to company digitalization; thus, considerable investments in blockchain are being made. However, there is no single blockchain technology, but various solutions exist, and they cannot interoperate with one each other. The ecosystem envisioned by the Industry 4.0 does not have centralized management or leading organization, so a single blockchain solution cannot be imposed. The various organizations hold their own blockchains, which must interoperate seamlessly. Despite some solutions for blockchain interoperability being proposed, the problem is still open. This paper aims to devise a secure solution for blockchain interoperability. The proposed approach consists of a relay scheme based on Trusted Execution Environment to provide higher security guarantees than the current literature. In particular, the proposed solution adopts an off-chain secure computation element invoked by a smart contract on a blockchain to securely communicate with its peered counterpart. A prototype has been implemented and used for the performance assessment, e.g., to measure the latency increase due to cross-blockchain interactions. The achieved and reported experimental results show that the proposed security solution introduces an additional latency that is entirely tolerable for transactions. At the same time, the usage of the Trusted Execution Environment imposes a negligible overhead.

CBDC bridging between Hyperledger Fabric and permissioned EVM-based blockchains

“…Our goal is to perform a first validation and check whether the delay caused by the solution is within the acceptable range. Our preliminary results show that the overhead introduced by the bridge (compared to the steps which are performed within the blockchain networks) are in line with other recent studies (e.g., [13] using Cactus, separating intra and interblockchain communication) and in most cases, are below 30% of the end-to-end response time. There are of course several further improvements of the measurement configuration necessary before a well-founded benchmarking campaign: separation of components, changing consensus mechanism at the Besu side (from PoW to IBFT), and more precise workload definitions would be the most obvious ones.…”

A Decentralised Real Estate Transfer Verification based on Self-Sovereign Identity and Smart Contracts

“…Data decentralisation is among the core parts of the proposed work. Although, one of the drawbacks of blockchain is the use of varying standards which causes fragmentation in adoption, hence interoperability between blockchains only occurs among technologies with same open source implementation or using a trusted party (Bellavista et al, 2021).…”

Scalability Solutions in Blockchain-Supported Manufacturing: A Survey

“…Payment channels [86], [87] Sidechains [41], [88] Cross-chain [89], [90], [91], [92], [93], [94], [69], [70] Off-chain [71], [95], [96], [97], [98], [99]…”

“…The above-presented concepts are well presented, however, none of them are discussing how the improved scalability of the system will affect the property of security and decentralization. The trilemma is discussed in a proposed cross-chain protocol of interoperable blockchains for collaborative manufacturing [92]. Existing cross-chain protocols are being extended using a trusted execution environment to increase the security of the solution.…”