Abstract
With the increasing spread and adoption of electronics and software as integral parts of all kinds of physical devices, such devices are becoming controlled by their embedded software. Correspondingly, the manufacturing business has started the transition from selling hardware to selling features (e.g. “insane mode” and “ludicrous mode” in Tesla Model S). Consequently, a trustworthy system to automate such a process becomes essential. This article introduces a permissioned blockchain-based feature management system for assembly devices. Firstly, it leverages software licensing technology to control assembly devices’ features. Secondly, by recording the license ownership transaction data in a permissioned blockchain, the approach (1) takes advantage of blockchain’s trust mechanism and its distributed nature to improve the trustworthiness of the feature management system, and (2) adopts the permissioned blockchain technology to ensure that the license transactions are only visible and applicable to authenticated actors. We further describe an implementation, a proof-of-concept evaluation focusing on functionality and performance, as well as a security analysis.
Highlights
I NSTEAD of placing all the attention on the hardware, assembly device manufacturers have realized that it is the embedded software that dictates most of the device’s features and/or functionalities
Drawing upon the trustworthiness properties of blockchain technology, we further describe an implementation, a proofof-concept evaluation focusing on functionality and performance, as well as a security analysis
Fabric is a permissioned blockchain with identity management, namely transaction records are confidential against unauthenticated users
Summary
I NSTEAD of placing all the attention on the hardware, assembly device manufacturers have realized that it is the embedded software that dictates most of the device’s features and/or functionalities. Fabric is a permissioned blockchain with identity management, namely transaction records are confidential against unauthenticated users It adopts a modular and pluggable architecture, which makes it compatible with existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and various implementations of consensus protocols like RAFT [20]. Many existing blockchain platforms follow State-Machine Replication (SMR) [22], which requires the introducing of non-standard smart contract programming languages and measures against Denial-of-Service attack [21] Fabric combines both active and passive state machine replication mechanisms and adopts the so-called execute-order-validate architecture [21]. Due to the adoption of public blockchain, the approach is not suitable for the FMS use cases where the license transaction records are considered as business secrets between the feature seller and the buyer. Reinventing a special blockchain solution instead of utilizing the existing mature blockchain platform to achieve the same purpose might be challenging in the industry use cases, for the following reasons: (1) a special blockchain solution is expensive to develop and maintain, and (2) before the customized system is developed it is hard to prove and evaluate the concept
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