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.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilIndustry 4.0 is a significant technological trend at the crossroads of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and digital manufacturing that is gaining increasingly more momentum pushed by big companies and central/regional governments.The promise of Industry 4.0 is manifold and includes delivering new services, enabling new business opportunities, and creating new employment [1,2,3]
While the blockchain is seen as an enabling technology to support the advent of Industry 4.0, it is supported by many different solutions, which are not interoperable
The research community has recently started to investigate the problem of blockchain interoperability and to propose various kinds of solutions, which have been unable to resolve the problem fully
Summary
Introduction published maps and institutional affilIndustry 4.0 is a significant technological trend at the crossroads of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and digital manufacturing that is gaining increasingly more momentum pushed by big companies and central/regional governments.The promise of Industry 4.0 is manifold and includes delivering new services, enabling new business opportunities, and creating new employment [1,2,3]. Industry 4.0 puts forward as a core idea a unified and fully integrated view of manufacturing enterprises that is vertical, from the shop floor to the top-level management, and horizontal, across the whole supply chain. Industry 4.0 standardization efforts are paving the way to the possibility to support deeply integrated supply chains [2,4,5]. Some sectors, such as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing, already adopting very advanced automation solutions on the shop floor several decades ago, are still not ready for the fully-interconnected Industry 4.0 vision. Some sectors, such as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing, already adopting very advanced automation solutions on the shop floor several decades ago, are still not ready for the fully-interconnected Industry 4.0 vision. iations.
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