Blockchain Cryptocurrency Digital Transformation Internet of Things - JANUARY 2020
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JANUARY 2020 www.computer.org
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IEEE Computer Society Magazine Editors in Chief
Computer IEEE Intelligent Systems IEEE Pervasive Computing
Jeff Voas, NIST V.S. Subrahmanian, Dartmouth Marc Langheinrich, Università
College della Svizzera italiana
Computing in Science &
Engineering IEEE Internet Computing IEEE Security & Privacy
Lorena A. Barba (Interim), George Pallis, University David Nicol, University of Illinois
George Washington University of Cyprus at Urbana-Champaign
IEEE Annals of the History IEEE Micro IEEE Software
of Computing Lizy Kurian John, University Ipek Ozkaya, Software
Gerardo Con Diaz, University of of Texas at Austin Engineering Institute
California, Davis
IEEE MultiMedia IT Professional
IEEE Computer Graphics Shu-Ching Chen, Florida Irena Bojanova, NIST
and Applications International University
Torsten Möller, Universität Wien
www.computer.org/computingedge 1
JANUARY 2020 • VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1
From Geographic
From Dealing With One Collocation
Domain at a Time
To Worldwide
Distribution
THEME HERE
RE
To Dealing With
Everywhere
Multiple Domains
From Wishing for
Experienced End
Cross- RE With Users
Domain RE Everyone To Empowering
Newbies
27 36 41
Ubiquitous
RE
From Focusing on
From Wishing for Software
Well-Understood
To Holistically Taking
Processes RE for
Open RE Into Consideration
Everything
To Accepting People, Things, and
Openness Services
Automated
Cryptocurrencies:
Legend:
Gray Rectangles: Barriers
Ubiquitous
RE From Direct Interaction With
Representative End Users
The IoT
Transparency Requirements
Colored Boxes: Required Transformations
Circles: Dimensions of Ubiquity
To Indirect Interaction With a
Crowd and Digital
versus Privacy Engineering: A Transformation:
Paradigm Shift that Toward the Data-
Affects Everyone Driven Enterprise
Blockchain
8 On the Origins and Variations of Blockchain
Technologies
ALAN T. SHERMAN, FARID JAVANI, HAIBIN ZHANG, AND ENIS
GOLASZEWSKI
15 BLOCKCHAIN
GEORGE STRAWN
Cryptocurrency
18 A Service-Oriented Perspective on Blockchain
Smart Contracts
FLORIAN DANIEL AND LUCA GUIDA
27 Cryptocurrencies: Transparency versus Privacy
NIR KSHETRI
Digital Transformation
31 Skills and Competencies for Digital Transformation
STEPHEN J. ANDRIOLE
36 Ubiquitous Requirements Engineering: A Paradigm
Shift that Affects Everyone
KARINA VILLELA, EDUARD C. GROEN, AND JOERG DOERR
Internet of Things
41 The IoT and Digital Transformation: Toward the
Data-Driven Enterprise
ALEXANDER A. PFLAUM AND PHILIPP GOLZER
46 Extending Patient-Chatbot Experience with Internet
of Things and Background Knowledge: Case
Studies with Healthcare Applications
AMIT SHETH, HONG YUNG YIP, AND SAEEDEH SHEKARPOUR
46
Departments
4 Magazine Roundup
7 Editor’s Note: Blockchain to the Rescue
72 Conference Calendar
Extending
Patient-Chatbot
Experience with
Internet of Things
and Background Subscribe to ComputingEdge for free at
Knowledge www.computer.org/computingedge.
CS FOCUS
Magazine
Roundup
of this article from the Septem-
ber/October 2019 issue of Com-
puting in Science & Engineering
eliminate the speed-limiting
charge iteration in MD with
a novel extended-Lagrangian
scheme. The extended-Lagrang-
ian reactive MD (XRMD) code
T
drastically improves energy con-
he IEEE Computer furry friends. The authors of this servation while substantially
Society’s lineup of 12 article from the September 2019 reducing time-to-solution. Fur-
peer-reviewed tech- issue of Computer report on an thermore, the authors introduce
nical magazines covers cut- empirical study investigating a new polarizable charge equili-
ting-edge topics ranging from the user perceptions of a popu- bration (PQEq) model to accu-
software design and computer lar dog activity tracker. Results rately predict atomic charges and
graphics to Internet comput- show that these trackers have a polarization.
ing and security, from scien- positive impact on owners’ moti-
tific applications and machine vation to increase their physical IEEE Annals of the
intelligence to visualization activities with their dogs. History of Computing
and microchip design. Here are
highlights from recent issues. Computing in Science & Founding and Growing
Engineering Adobe Systems, Inc.
Computer Founded in 1982, Adobe Sys-
Scalable Reactive tems heralded several of the
Log My Dog: Perceived Molecular Dynamics technological innovations nec-
Impact of Dog Activity Simulations for essary to precipitate the emer-
Tracking Computational Synthesis gence of desktop publishing as
The pet industry is catching up Reactive molecular dynamics well as many features of modern
in the wearables market, and (MD) simulation is a power- office computing, digital media,
pet activity and location track- ful research tool for describing and graphic arts. In this article
ers are increasingly worn by our chemical reactions. The authors from the July–September 2019
4 January 2020 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 2469-7087/20 © 2020 IEEE
issue of IEEE Annals of the His- to tune two algorithms for char- posing significant complications
tory of Computing, Adobe found- acterizing satellite detections of for system and algorithm design.
ers Charles Geschke and John wildfires. In this article from the May/June
Warnock cover their professional 2019 issue of IEEE Internet Com-
history, the conception of Adobe IEEE Intelligent Systems puting, the authors present a
Systems, and its growth. They also dynamic global manager selection
explain the technology behind the Using Social Media to Detect algorithm to minimize energy con-
advances in computer printing, Socio-Economic Disaster sumption cost by fully exploiting
electronic file transfer, and digital Recovery the system diversities in geogra-
art and photography. Adobe, its There has been growing interest phy and variation over time. The
products, and its engineers played in harnessing artificial intelligence algorithm makes real-time deci-
a key role in these developments, (AI) to improve situational aware- sions based on measurable system
which enabled desktop publishing ness for disaster management. parameters through stochastic opti-
and the publishing revolution. As a first step toward investigat- mization methods, while achiev-
ing the possibility of developing ing performance balance between
IEEE Computer Graphics an AI-based method for detecting energy cost and latency. Extensive
and Applications socio-economic recovery, this arti- trace-driven simulations verify the
cle from the May/June 2019 issue effectiveness and efficiency of the
Uncertainty-Aware of IEEE Intelligent Systems stud- proposed algorithm. The authors
Visualization for Analyzing ies the correlations between pub- also highlight several potential
Heterogeneous Wildfire lic sentiment on social media and research directions that remain
Detections socio-economic recovery activi- open and require future elabora-
There is growing interest in using ties as reflected in market data. tions in analyzing geo-distributed
data science techniques to charac- The result shows multiple correla- big data.
terize and predict natural disasters tions between sentiment on social
and extreme weather events. Such media and the socio-economic IEEE Micro
techniques merge noisy data gath- recovery activities involved in
ered in the real world, from sources restarting daily routines. Conven- Accelerating Image-Sensor-
such as satellite detections, with tional socio-economic recovery Based Deep-Learning
algorithms that strongly depend indicators, such as governmental Applications
on the noise, resolution, and uncer- statistical data, have a significant In this article from the September/
tainty in these data. In this article time lag before publishing. Using October 2019 issue of IEEE Micro,
from the September/October 2019 public sentiment on social media the authors review two inference
issue of IEEE Computer Graph- instead can improve situational accelerators that exploit value
ics and Applications, the authors awareness in recovery operations. properties in deep neural networks
present a visualization approach (DNNs): Diffy and Tactical. Diffy
for interpolating multiresolution, IEEE Internet Computing targets spatially correlated acti-
uncertain satellite detections of vations in computational imag-
wildfires into intuitive visual rep- Energy-Efficient Analytics for ing DNNs. Tactical targets sparse
resentations. They use extrinsic, Geographically Distributed neural networks using a low-over-
intrinsic, coincident, and adja- Big Data head hardware/software weight-
cent uncertainty representations Big data analytics on geographi- skipping front-end. The authors
as appropriate for understand- cally distributed datasets (across combine these accelerators into Di-
ing the information at each stage. data centers or clusters) has been Tactical to boost benefits for both
To demonstrate their approach, attracting increased interest in scene understanding workloads
the authors use their framework both academia and industry, and computational imaging tasks.
www.computer.org/computingedge 5
MAGAZINE ROUNDUP
IEEE MultiMedia authors of this article from the attacks show the risks associated
April–June 2019 issue of IEEE Per- with these new technologies and
A 3D Scene Management vasive Computing describe Eva, a can help us articulate the need for
Method Based on the conversational robot developed to better security practices.
Triangular Mesh for Large- conduct therapeutic interventions
Scale Web3D Scenes for PwD. A previously reported IEEE Software
Real-time rendering of large-scale study conducted with Eva using a
Web3D scenes was difficult to Wizard-of-Oz approach proved that Perceptions of Gender
implement in virtual-reality sys- it successfully engaged PwD with Diversity’s Impact on Mood in
tems and geographic information the sessions. This article reports Software Development Teams
systems (GIS) in the past because improvements to Eva that allow the Gender inequality persists in IT
of the technical constraints in CPU, robot to guide the therapy sessions teams. The authors of this article
memory, and network bandwidth. without human intervention and from the September/October 2019
In this article from the July–Septem- findings from its deployment in a issue of IEEE Software examine
ber 2019 issue of IEEE MultiMedia, a geriatric residence. These improve- how gender composition affects
model management strategy is pro- ments include the automatic gen- the workplace atmosphere. They
posed based on triangular meshes, eration of a therapy script tailored discuss the problem of gender dis-
in which neighborhood buildings to the profile and preferences of the crimination and consider methods
are considered as nodes and con- participants, expectations about to reduce inequality.
nected. Each node in the mesh has the type and length of responses
a set of level-of-detail (LOD) models, by participants to certain queries, IT Professional
including high-, medium-, and low- and strategies to recover from com-
precision models. Besides a model munication breakdowns. A user Toward a Blockchain-Enabled
file, the high-precision LOD of the study with five PwD shows that Crowdsourcing Platform
node can be a subtriangular mesh. when acting in fully autonomous Crowdsourcing has been pursued
The 3D models in a complex scene mode, Eva is as effective in engag- as a way to leverage the power
can be flexibly managed with some ing participants in the therapy as of the crowd for many purposes
nested triangular meshes. Accord- with the Wizard-of-Oz condition, in diverse sectors, including col-
ing to the experimental results, and that communication break- lecting information, aggregating
the proposed method effectively downs are adequately resolved. funds, and gathering employees.
achieves the progressive download- Data integrity and nonrepudiation
ing, dynamic loading, and real-time IEEE Security & Privacy are of utmost importance in these
display for a large-scale 3D scene. systems and are currently not guar-
Its performance is better than the Stealing, Spying, and Abusing: anteed. Blockchain technology has
traditional methods. Consequences of Attacks on been proven to improve on these
Internet of Things Devices aspects. In this article from the
IEEE Pervasive Computing The authors of this article from the September/October 2019 issue of
September/October 2019 issue of IT Professional, the authors investi-
A Conversational Robot IEEE Security & Privacy studied the gate the benefits that the adoption
to Conduct Therapeutic security practices of a diverse set of blockchain technology can bring
Interventions for Dementia of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in crowdsourcing systems. To this
Verbal communication is an essen- with different architectures. They end, they provide examples of real-
tial component of effective non- found vulnerabilities that can be life crowdsourcing use cases and
pharmacological interventions for exploited to launch novel attacks. explore the benefits of using block-
people with dementia (PwD). The The real-world implications of IoT chain, mainly as a database.
6 ComputingEdge January 2020
EDITOR’S NOTE
Blockchain to the Rescue
M any tough problems facing business,
government, and individuals could
be solved through indelible ledgers.
Transparent, secure transaction records could help
improve trust and efficiency in everything from
Transparency versus Privacy” warns that cyber-
criminals are sometimes able to expose the iden-
tity of cryptocurrency users despite pseudonyms
and concealed IP addresses.
Business professionals need to understand a
payments to voting. Enter blockchain-based sys- variety of new technologies—not just blockchain—
tems. This issue of ComputingEdge explores what in order to compete. “Skills and Competencies
makes blockchain such a powerful technology with for Digital Transformation,” from IT Professional,
the potential to transform numerous industries. provides an overview of the high-tech tools that
“On the Origins and Variations of Blockchain companies should consider implementing. IEEE
Technologies,” from IEEE Security & Privacy, pro- Software’s “Ubiquitous Requirements Engineering:
vides a history of blockchain going back to David A Paradigm Shift that Affects Everyone,” describes
Chaum’s 1979 vault system. The authors describe the evolving role of software engineering in digi-
the foundational elements of the technology and tal transformation, particularly in addressing the
compare the properties of diverse blockchain sys- needs of diverse users.
tems. IT Professional’s “BLOCKCHAIN” discusses The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the cru-
the technology’s growing popularity with busi- cial technologies that modern businesses need to
nesses and other organizations. employ. In “The IoT and Digital Transformation:
The first modern blockchain was implemented Toward the Data-Driven Enterprise,” from IEEE Per-
in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, and cryptocur- vasive Computing, the authors propose a process
rency remains the most common application of for companies that want to adopt IoT solutions.
blockchain technology. IEEE Internet Computing’s Healthcare is among the industries that can benefit
“A Service-Oriented Perspective on Blockchain from the IoT, as shown in IEEE Intelligent Systems’
Smart Contracts” examines the underlying tech- “Extending Patient-Chatbot Experience with Inter-
nology used in cryptocurrency platforms like Bit- net of Things and Background Knowledge: Case
coin and Ethereum. Computer’s “Cryptocurrencies: Studies with Healthcare Applications.”
2469-7087/20 © 2020 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society January 2020 7
REAL-WORLD CRYPTO
Editors: Peter Gutmann, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz | David Naccache, david.naccache@ens.fr | Charles C. Palmer, ccpalmer@us.ibm.com
On the Origins and Variations
of Blockchain Technologies
Alan T. Sherman, Farid Javani, Haibin Zhang, and Enis Golaszewski | University of Maryland, Baltimore County
W e explore the origins of
blockchain technologies
to better understand the enduring
help people understand where
blockchains came from, whether
they are important, and if they will
and controls who may update state
and issue transactions. A private
blockchain is a permissioned block-
needs they address. We identify the persist. (For a complete list of refer- chain controlled by one organiza-
five key elements of a blockchain, ences, see A. Sherman et al.)1 tion. A consortium blockchain is
show the embodiments of these a permissioned blockchain involv-
elements, and examine how these Elements of Blockchains ing a group of organizations. In a
elements come together to yield Blockchains provide a mechanism permissionless blockchain, anyone
important properties in selected through which mutually distrustful may potentially append new blocks,
systems. To facilitate comparing the remote parties (nodes) can reach with the consensus policy (e.g., a
many variations of blockchains, we consensus on the state of a ledger majority of participants) determin-
also describe the four crucial roles of information. To trace the origins ing which continuation is valid.
of common blockchain participants. of these technologies, we start by Blockchains achieve consensus
Our historical exploration highlights identifying their essential elements and control (and, in particular,
the 1979 work of David Chaum, informally. A blockchain is a dis- prevent double spending) in part
whose vault system embodies many tributed ledger comprising blocks through applying protocols and
of the elements of blockchains. (records) of information, includ- establishing high costs (both eco-
ing information about transac- nomic and computational) to modify
Understanding tions between two or more parties. the ledger. Typically, permissioned
Blockchains The blocks are cryptographically systems run faster than permission-
With myriad blockchain distrib- linked to create an immutable led- less systems do because their control
uted ledger systems in existence, ger. Nodes may append informa- and consensus strategies depend on
more than 550 associated pat- tion to the ledger through invoking faster fault-tolerant protocols3 rather
ent applications under review, and transactions. An access policy deter- than on time-consuming crypto-
much associated hype, it can be mines who may read the informa- graphic proofs of work (PoWs), and
difficult to make sense of these tion. A control policy determines they usually involve fewer nodes.
systems, their properties, and how who may participate in the evolu- Gencer et al. show that permission-
they compare. Through exploring tion of the blockchain and how new less blockchains (such as Bitcoin
the origins of these technologies, blocks may potentially be appended and Ethereum) are much more cen-
including David Chaum’s 1979 vault to the blockchain. A consensus policy tralized than many people assume:
system, we provide insights and a determines which state of the block- 20 mining pools control 90% of the
clear and useful way to think about chain is valid, resolving disputes computing power.
blockchains. Our historical perspec- should conflicting possible continu- Some blockchains additionally
tive distills important ideas, identi- ations appear. support the idea of smart contracts,
fies enduring needs, and shows how As explained by Cachin and which execute terms of agreements
changing technologies can satisfy Vukolic,2 a range of control policies between parties, possibly without
those needs. This perspective will is possible, including permissioned, human intervention. These agree-
consortium, private, and permis- ments might be embodied as arbi-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSEC.2019.2893730
sionless blockchains. In a permis- trary computer programs including
Date of publication: 20 March 2019 sioned blockchain, a body identifies conditional statements.
8 January 2020 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 2469-7087/20 © 2020 IEEE
72 January/February 2019 Copublished by the IEEE Computer and Reliability Societies 1540-7993/19©2019IEEEEmbodiments of PoW for both mining and achiev- and private transaction computa-
the Elements ing consensus. tions that protects individual pri-
Although the seminal paper on Bit- PoW aims, in part, to defend vacy through physical security.
coin appeared in 2008 (with the against Sybil attacks, in which adver- The building blocks of this system
mysterious author Satoshi Naka- saries attempt to forge multiple include physically secure vaults,
moto), 4 most of the underlying identities and use those forged iden- existing cryptographic primi-
technological ideas had arisen many tities to influence the consensus pro- tives (symmetric and asymmetric
years earlier. A blockchain is a type cess. With PoW, however, a node’s encryption, cryptographic hash
of distributed database, an idea that influence on the consensus process functions, and digital signatures),
goes back to at least the 1970s (e.g., is proportional to its computational and a new primitive introduced by
Wong11). More generally, the idea of power: forging multiple identities Chaum—threshold secret sharing.8
record keeping goes back millennia, that share the adversary’s given com- Chaum’s 1982 work went largely
including to ancient Mesopotamia. putational power does not help. To unnoticed, apparently because he
Kanare describes proper methods adapt to varying amounts of avail- never made any effort to publish it
for scientific logging, including the able computational resources, PoW in a conference or journal, instead
idea of preserving all transaction systems dynamically throttle the pursuing different approaches to
records, in addition to the history difficulty of the PoW problem to achieving individual privacy.
of any modifications to the collected achieve a certain target rate at which In Chaum’s system, each vault
data—ideas that are found in many the problems are solved. signs, records, and broadcasts each
systems (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric). Permissioned blockchains can be transaction it processes. Chaum
The idea of immutably chaining modeled using the concept of (Byz- states, “Because the aggregate
blocks of information with a cryp- antine fault-tolerant) state machine in cludes COMPRESSED_HIS-
tographic hash function appears replication, a notion proposed in TORY, the [cryptographic] check-
in the 1979 dissertation of Ralph 1978 by Lamport and, later, con- sum is actually ‘chained’ through the
Merkle at Stanford, in which Merkle cisely formalized by Schneider. entire history of consensus states.”9
explains how information can be State machine replication specifies He further says, “Nodes remember
linked in a tree structure now known what are the transactions and in and will provide all messages they
as a Merkle hash tree. A linear chain what order they are processed, even have output—each vault saves all it
is a special case of a tree, and a tree in the presence of (Byzantine) faults has signed, up to some limit, and will
provides a more efficient way of and unreliable communications.3 supply any saved thing on request;
chaining information than does a Thereby, to achieve a strong form only dead vaults can cause loss of
linear chain. Subsequently, in 1990, of transaction consensus, many recently signed things.”9
Haber and Stornetta applied these permissioned systems build on the Chaum’s system embodies a
ideas to time-stamp documents, cre- ideas from the 1998 Paxos protocol mechanism for achieving member-
ating the company Surety in 1994. of Lamport 7 (which deals only ship consistency: “Among other
These prior works, however, do not with crash failures) and from the things, the algorithms must provide a
include other elements and tech- 2002 Practical Byzantine Fault kind of synchronization and agree-
niques of blockchain. Tolerance protocol of Castro and ment among nodes about allowing
To prevent an adversary from Liskov. Nakamoto observed that new nodes into the network, remov-
unduly influencing the consen- the permissionless Bitcoin system ing nodes from the network, and the
sus process, many permissionless realizes Byzantine agreement in status of nodes once in the network.”9
systems require that new blocks open networks. The system also embodies a weak
include a proof of computational Arguably, many of the elements form of transaction consensus, albeit
work. Nakamoto’s paper cites Back’s5 of blockchains are embodied in vaguely described and apparently
2002 effective construction from David Chaum’s 1979 vault system,8 not supporting concurrent client re-
Hashcash. In 1992, Dwork and described in his 1982 dissertation9 quests: “If the output of one partic-
Naor proposed proof of compu- at Berkeley, including detailed ular processor module is used as the
tation to combat junk mail. The specifications. Chaum describes output for the entire vault, the other
idea and a construction underly- the design of a distributed com- processors must be able to compare
ing PoW, however, may be seen in puter system that can be estab- their output to its output, and have
an initial form in 1974 in Merkle’s lished, maintained, and trusted by time to stop the output on its way
puzzles,6 which Merkle proposed mutually suspicious groups. It is a through the isolation devices.”9 The
to implement public-key cryptog- public record-keeping system with consensus algorithm involves major-
raphy. Bitcoin was the first to use group membership consistency ity vote of nodes based on observed
www.computer.org/computingedge 9
www.computer.org/security 73REAL-WORLD CRYPTO
signed messages entering and leav- Chaum assumes, essentially, a unique pseudonym which appears
ing vaults. best-effort broadcast model, and he in a roster of acceptable clients.”9
Chaum created his vaults system does not provide mechanisms for To enable private transactions for
before the emergence of the terms achieving consensus with unreli- blockchains, engineers are explor-
permissioned and permissionless able communications—technolo- ing the application of trusted
blockchains, and his system does gies that subsequently have been execution environments, continu-
not neatly fall into either of these developed and applied in modern ing an approach fundamental in
discrete categories. In Chaum’s permissioned systems. Chaum’s Chaum’s vaults.
system, each node identifies itself dissertation does not include the In 1994, Szabo 10 coined the
uniquely by posting a public key, ideas of PoW, dynamic throttling of term smart contract, but the idea of
authenticated by level 2 trustees. work difficulty, and explicit smart systematically applying rules to exe-
For this reason, some people may contracts (though Chaum’s vaults cute the terms of an agreement has
consider Chaum’s system a permis- support arbitrary distributed pri- a long history in trading systems.
sioned blockchain. vate computation). For example, in 1949, with a system
This narrow view, however, dimin- Unlike in most blockchain sys- involving ticker tapes and humans
ishes the fact that each node can be tems, nodes in Chaum’s system hold applying rules, Future, Inc. gener-
authorized in a public ceremony secret values, which necessitates a ated buy and sell orders for com-
independently from any trustee. more complex mechanism for restart- modities. Recently, so-called hybrid
During this ceremony, vaults are ing after failures. Using what Chaum blockchains have emerged, which
assembled from bins of parts, which calls partial keys, any vault can back combine Byzantine fault-tolerant
the public (not necessarily nodes) up its state securely by encrypting state machine replication with
can inspect and test—a procedure it with a key and then escrowing defenses against Sybil attacks—for
that inspired Chaum to coin the this key using what we now call example, PeerCensus, ByzCoin,
more limited phrase cut and choose. threshold secret sharing. After reading Solidus, Hybrid Consensus, Elas-
Regardless of whether one views Chaum’s February 1979 technical tico, OmniLedger, and RapidChain.
some configurations of Chaum’s report8 that describes partial keys, Also, Hyperledger (an umbrella
vaults as permissionless systems, Adi Shamir published an elegant project involving Fabric, a system
the trust bestowed through the alternate method for secret sharing for permissioned blockchains) and
public ceremony creates a system in November 1979. Ethereum (a platform for public
whose trust model is the antithesis Chaum also notes that pseudonyms blockchains) have joined forces.
of that of a private (permissioned) can play an important role in effect- Recently, researchers have applied
blockchain. For these reasons, we ing anonymity: “Another use allows game theory to model and analyze
consider Chaum’s system pub- an individual to correspond with a the behaviors of players and mining
licly permissioned. record keeping organization under a pools in blockchain-based digital
currencies (see Dhamal and Lewen-
berg). Table 1 chronicles some
of the important cryptographic
Table 1. A timeline of selected discoveries in cryptography and blockchain technology. discoveries underlying blockchain
1970 James Ellis, public-key cryptography discovered at Government Communications technologies. For example, in
Headquarters (GCHQ) in secret 2018, the European Patent Office
issued the first patent on block-
1973 Clifford Cocks, RSA cryptosystem discovered at GCHQ in secret
chain—a method for enforcing
1974 Ralph Merkle, cryptographic puzzles (paper published in 1978) smart contracts.
1976 Diffie and Hellman, public-key cryptography discovered at Stanford
1977 Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, RSA cryptosystem invented at the Massachusetts Comparison of Selected
Institute of Technology Blockchain Systems
To illustrate how the elements come
1979 David Chaum, vaults and secret sharing (dissertation in 1982)
together in actual blockchain systems,
1982 Lamport, Shostak, and Pease, Byzantine Generals Problem we compare a few selected systems,
1992 Dwork and Naor, combating junk mail including Chaum’s vaults, Bitcoin,
2002 Adam Bach, Hashcash Dash, Corda, and Hyperledger Fab-
ric, chosen for diversity. Table 2
2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin
describes how each of these sys-
2017 Wright and Savanah, nChain European patent application (issued in 2018) tems carries out the four crucial
10 ComputingEdge January 2020
74 IEEE Security & Privacy January/February 2019participant roles of any blockchain that implements policy. Despite ledgers, they will likely be around
defined ahead. For more context, these significant powers, the control in various forms for a long time.
Table 3 characterizes a few important structure is still more distributed There are, however, some trou-
properties of these systems and of (anyone can potentially become a bling fundamental conflicts that
one additional system—Ethereum. core developer) than for a permis- have not been solved. These con-
In his vault system, Chaum 9 sioned system controlled entirely flicts include tensions between
identifies four crucial participant by a prespecified entity. In Bitcoin, the fol low ing pairs of poten-
roles of any blockchain, which in each round, the winning miner (a tially dissonant concerns: privacy
we call watchers, doers, executives, doer) becomes an executive for that and indelibility, anonymity and
and czars. The watchers passively round. It is instructive to understand accountability, stability and alter-
observe and check the state of the how each blockchain system allo- native future continuations, and
ledger. The doers (level 1 trustees) cates the four participant roles. current engineering choices and
carry out actions, including serving Table 3 illustrates some of the long-term security. For example,
state. The executives (level 2 trust- possible variations of blockchains, recent European privacy laws grant
ees) sign (or otherwise attest to) the including varying control and con- individuals the right to demand
blocks. The czars (level 3 trustees) sensus policies as well as different that their personal data be erased
change the executives and their pol- types of smart contracts. Whereas from most repositories (the right
icies. Chaum refers to these partici- most blockchain systems maintain to be forgotten). Satisfying this
pants as bodies,9 leaving it unclear a single chain, Corda supports mul- erasure requirement is highly prob-
whether they could be algorithms. tiple independent chains, per node lematic for indelible blockchains,
Although most systems do not or among subsets of nodes. Similarly, especially for ones whose nodes
explicitly specify these roles, all Chaum’s system also supports mul- lack physical security.
systems embody them, though tiple chains. While most blockchains An attraction of blockchains is
with varying nuances. For example, require each node to maintain the their promise of stability enforced
many people naively think of Bit- same state, Corda’s and Chaum’s sys- through consensus, yet sometimes
coin as a fully distributed system tems do not. the nodes cannot agree, resulting in
free of any centralized control, but, a fork and associated possible splits
in fact, Bitcoin’s core developers— Conflicts and Challenges in the continuations of the chain. In
as is true for all distributed sys- Because blockchain technologies a hard fork, level 3 trustees issue a
tems—carry out the role of czars, address enduring needs for per - significant change in the rules that is
changing the underlying software manent, indelible, and trusted incompatible with the old rules. In a
Table 2. Alignment of participant roles across five blockchain systems.
Chaum, 1982 Bitcoin, 2008 Dash, 2014 Corda, 2016 Hyperledger Fabric,
A flexible A permissionless A system that speeds up A permissioned 2016
system based system using Bitcoin with a masternode system with A permissioned system
Role on vaults PoW network smart contracts with smart contracts
Watchers Any computer Nodes (distinct Any computer online Nodes Peers
Passively check state online9 from full nodes)
Doers Level 1 trustee Full nodes Miners Nodes Peers
Carry out actions,
including serving state
Executives Level 2 trustee Winning miner Winning masternode Nodes (each Endorsing peers
Sign blocks (or (promoted (promoted (promoted by an algorithm node is an
otherwise attest to from level 1 by from doers from the masternode executive for its
them) czars)9 each round) network, which anyone Corda blocks,
may join for 1,000 Dash) called states)
Czars Level 3 Core developers Quorum of masternodes Permissioning Endorsement policies
Change executives and trustee9 service
their policies
www.computer.org/computingedge 11
www.computer.org/security 75REAL-WORLD CRYPTO
Table 3. Three properties of several distributed ledger systems. T o understand blockchain sys-
tems, it is helpful to view them
in terms of how the watchers, doers,
System Permissioned? Basis of Consensus Smart Contracts executives, and czars carry out their
functions under the guidance of the
Chaum, Permissioned, Weak consensus; Private arbitrary
1982 with option does not handle distributed access, control, and consensus poli-
for publicly concurrent client computation cies. This systematic abstract view
permissioned requests helps focus attention on crucial ele-
ments and facilitates a balanced
Bitcoin, Permissionless PoW Conditional comparison of systems. Blockchains
2008 payment and address many longstanding inherent
limited smart needs for indelible ledgers, from finan-
contracts through cial transactions to property records
scripts
and supply chains. With powerful
Dash, Combination Proof of stake No existing cryptographic techniques, a
2014 wide set of available variations, and a
Ethereum, Permissionless PoW Yes, nonprivate large amount of resources allocated to
2014 Turing complete these technologies, blockchains hold
objects significant potential.
Hyperledger Permissioned Based on Yes, off-chain
Fabric, state machine Acknowledgments
2015 replication We thank Dan Lee, Linda Oliva, and
Corda, Permissioned Based on Yes (set of Konstantinos Patsourakos for their
2016 state machine functions), helpful comments. Alan T. Sherman
replication including explicit was supported in part by the National
links to human Science Foundation under Scholarship
language for Service grant 1241576.
References
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in the rules for which the old system more than 184 GB). and E. Golaszewski, On the ori-
recognizes valid blocks created by As of September 2018, the hash gins and variations of blockchain
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Additional challenges faci n g hard to find useful problems that have peer electronic cash system,” Bitcoin,
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amounts of energy spent on block- difficulty can be dynamically throt- bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
chain computations (especially tled. Some researchers are exploring 5. A. Back, “Hashcash: A denial of service
PoW), the high rates at which ledgers alternatives to PoW, such as proof counter-measure,” Hashcash, 2002.
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12 ComputingEdge January 2020
76 IEEE Security & Privacy January/February 2019This article originally appeared in
IEEE Security & Privacy, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019.
6. R. C. Merkle, “Secure communi- 10. N. Szabo, “Smart contracts,” 1994. [On- Farid Javani is a Ph.D. student at
cations over insecure channels,” line]. Available: http://www.fon.hum the University of Maryland, Bal-
Commun. ACM, vol. 21, no. 4, .uva.nl/rob/Courses/Information timore County. Contact him at
pp. 294–299, 1978. [Online]. Avail- InSpeech/CDROM/Literature javani1@umbc.edu.
able: https://dl.acm.org/citation /LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best
.cfm?doid=359460.359473 .vwh.net/smart.contracts.html Haibin Zhang is an assistant professor
7. L. Lamport, “The part-time parlia- 11. E. Wong, “Retrieving dispersed in the Department of Compu-
ment,” ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., vol. data from SDD-1: A system for ter Science and Electrical Engi-
16, no. 2, pp. 133–169, 1998. [Online]. distributed databases,” in Proc. 2nd neering at the Univer s i t y of
Available: https://dl.acm.org Berkeley Workshop Distributed Data Maryland, Baltimore County.
/citation.cfm?doid=279227.279229 Management and Comput. Networks, Haibin received a Ph.D. from the
8. D. L. Chaum, “Computer systems May 1977, pp. 217–235. University of Califor nia, Davis,
established, maintained, and trusted in 2001. His re search interests
by mutually suspicious groups,” Alan T. Sherman is a professor of include di str ibuted comput-
Elect. Eng. Res. Lab., Univ. Cali- computer science at the University i n g a n d secure blockchains.
fornia, Berkeley, Tech. Memo. of Maryland, Baltimore County. Co ntac t h i m at hbzhang@
UCB/ERL/M79/10, 1979. His research interests include umbc.edu.
9. D. L. Chaum, “Computer systems secure voting, applied cryptog-
established, maintained and trusted by raphy, and cybersecurity educa- Enis Golaszewski is a Ph.D. student
mutually suspicious groups,” Ph.D. tion. He is a Senior Member of the at the University of Maryland,
dissertation, Dept. Comput. Sci., IEEE. Contact him at sherman@ Baltimore County. Contact him
Univ. California, Berkeley, 1982. umbc.edu. at golaszewski@umbc.edu.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSEC.2019.2900896
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revised 19 December 2019IT and Twenty-First Century Employment
BLOCKCHAIN
George Strawn
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
This article originally appeared in
and Medicine
IT Professional, vol. 21, no. 1, 2019.
& “YABB,” YET ANOTHER book on blockchain (to become disconnected from the network. (Cold War
modify the acronym YACC—yet another complier worries about a nuclear arrack made this a major
compiler), Life After Google, was published in July concern.) By switching packets instead of circuits
of 2018 by the prolific author George Gilder. (Ama- and by distributing the switching function to every
zon currently lists 75 books on the topic.) As Internet router, that goal was achieved.
Gilder lays out in the book, he believes that the cli- On the other hand, very little thought was
ent–server model of current internet usage will be given to other dimensions of network security,
succeeded by a peer-to-peer (P2P) model emp- and so, we have been playing Internet security
loying blockchain: the technology that enabled catch-up ever since. (One might say that it is an ill
the cryptocurrency bitcoin a decade ago. Another wind that blows no good, since Internet security
YABB is IBM’s short Blockchain for Dummies jobs are in plentiful supply.) But as increasingly
(https://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/xi/ more functions of society are transferred to the
en/xim12354usen/ibm-blockchain_second- Internet, its lack of security has become a major
edition_final_XIM12354USEN.pdf), which is avail- societal problem. Gilder and others believe that
able for free download and has the more modest this lack of security is the Achilles heel of today’s
goal of showing how blockchain for business ledg- Internet, and the reason that P2P architecture and
ers is available now for practical use. In this paper, secure blockchain technology will supersede it.
I will review some related characteristics of the The original Internet architecture was in fact
Internet, of P2P, and of blockchain. Then, I will P2P. This simply means that any internet node
describe how blockchain is “ready for business could both provide services to other nodes and/or
use,” and finally, I will comment on its potential ask them to provide services. (For more depth, see
impact on 21st century employment and business. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer.) For
example, the file transfer protocol was/is bidirec-
tional: Any node can send and/or receive files. As
THE INTERNET, P2P, AND the Internet matured in the 1990s and 2000s, impor-
BLOCKCHAIN tant services arose that were unidirectional, for
One of the goals of the Internet architecture was
example, Google searches, Amazon purchases, and
to minimize points of failure. The switching centers
Facebook friends. These services were provided
that characterized the telephone network were
by nodes that came to be called servers, and nodes
such points of failure. If a switching center were to
that utilized those services were called clients.
be destroyed, the telephones in that area would The client–server model is subject to various
security breaches (of course, so is P2P). For exam-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITP.2018.2879244 ple, distributed denial-of-service attacks flood a
Date of current version 26 February 2019. server with so many requests for service that it
January/February 2019
2469-7087/20 © 2020 IEEE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
1520-9202 2018 IEEE
January 2020
91 15IT and Twenty-First Century Employment
shuts down. Also, most servers require usernames management, government, supply chain manage-
and passwords from clients (and perhaps credit ment, and health care. Since these use cases
card numbers). So, many users (me included) have replace (or at least reduce) the need for trusted
hundreds of usernames and passwords, which I third party oversight, that reduction in employ-
am supposed to remember and never write down. ment is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that many
(This situation seems to me to provide more liabil- of these use cases can contain “smart contracts”
ity protection for the server than security for the that automate various follow-on functions once a
client.) And security breaches of servers are legion, transaction has been completed (e.g., automatic
yielding crooks millions of usernames, passwords, payment once a shipment has been received).
and credit card numbers. Such hacks are of incre- Thus, the need for fewer manual steps may extend
well beyond transaction management.
asing importance as online banking and other
Perhaps even more important is that these use
significant transactions are conducted online.
cases typically take a significant amount of time to
Blockchain technology is simply a distribu-
complete. The use of blockchain could cut days
ted ledger on a P2P network whose transactions
and weeks to hours and minutes, and since time is
cannot be erased or altered (see https://en.m.
money, use of this technology could be doubly
wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain for implementation
cost-saving. Of course, in addition to increasing effi-
details). As new transactions occur and are verified, ciency, effectiveness could be improved as well. As
they are copied onto all copies of the ledger. It has Chapter Three of Dummies explains, blockchain
been said that blockchain/P2P might to for tran- can reduce business network (information, interac-
sactions what the Internet/Web did for Information. tion, and innovation) frictions in a number of ways.
Share ledgers, P2P transactions, and smart con-
BLOCKCHAIN FOR BUSINESS tracts are at the center of this business innovation.
TRANSACTIONS In a recent blockchain report (https://public.dhe.
Speaking of transactions, they are the busi- ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/gb/en/gbe03835usen/
ness activity that blockchain is ready to facilitate, gbe03835usen-00_GBE03835USEN.pdf) drawing on
according to IBM and others. Companies record 2965 conversations with C-suite executives, IBM
transactions in ledgers, and traditionally, each reported the following industry statistics: Over
company keeps its own ledger. Blockchain tech- one third of organizations across all industries
nology enables a single, shared ledger for all the and regions are already considering or are
companies engaging in related transactions. actively engaged with blockchain, and 66% of
Moreover, this shared ledger has several pleasing early adopters—or explorers—intend to adopt a
security characteristics. First, it is copied onto new platform business model that breaks the
the computers of all participating companies, boundaries of traditional market exchanges. It
making loss of data extremely unlikely. Second, would seem this train is moving.
once a transaction has been “agreed to,” it cannot
be changed or deleted. This provides a new level WHAT IS NEXT?
of “technological trust” that has traditionally Blockchain burst on the scene as the bitcoin
technology only ten years ago. It was the result
been provided by trusted third parties. Regard-
of innovative software, and hardware innova-
ing how a transaction is agreed to, the business
tions followed as the computationally expensive
use just described requires only a simple vote by
mining confirmation of transactions was opti-
the companies involved rather than an expensive
mized. On the other hand, 3-D printing (a.k.a.
“mining” activity as in the bitcoin application.
additive engineering) resulted from hardware
innovations over 30 years ago and is now also
USE CASES, EMPLOYMENT, AND moving (Amazon lists 100 books and gadgets on
OTHER IMPLICATIONS the subject). As Moore’s and related laws con-
Chapter four of Blockchain for Dummies tinue to lower the cost and raise the perfor-
describes a plethora of transaction/ledger use mance of IT systems, predicting what is next
cases the fall within the sphere of blockchain. requires matching new price points, innovative
These use cases occur in a wide range of thinking, and society’s needs and desires. It is an
areas: financial services, multinational policy exciting ride with far to go!
16
92 ComputingEdge
IT Professional
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