Interoperable Blockchains for Highly-Integrated Supply Chains in Collaborative Manufacturing

• Main Authors: Paolo Bellavista, Christian Esposito, Luca Foschini, Carlo Giannelli, Nicola Mazzocca, Rebecca Montanari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Industry 4.0; decentralized ledger; interoperability; blockchain; Trusted Execution Environment
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/15/4955

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.