Hardened Blockchain Infrastructure

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The world has undertaken the "digitalization" of a good part of its activities, and this trend has been in its infancy up till now. The product and service interchanges are starting to facilitating directly the trust between the parties without relying on trusted third parties, in a meaningful and scalable manner. The key enabling technology is that of blockchains. Even at this early stage, they are expected to be more dependable and geographically over-reaching, but a worrisome fact is that they might not be dependable in an ever-increasing number of ways. The security and privacy (to a degree) of the blockchains requires improvements, especially if they impact high-value (e.g., financial transactions) or safety-critical operations (e.g., those impacting human health). In this project with our industrial partner KNØX Industries Inc., we are primarily exploring the ways to harden the access to blockchain-related transactions and value storage, but expect that the findings will be applicable to wider classes of systems. We intend to integrate the complementary expertise of the team members varying from network security and formal verification methods and their applications.This project aims to set a sound basis for hardening the blockchain infrastructure that will overcome the existing limitations and costs of improving the security. Its strategic role is in providing the tools and methodologies to realize reliable and long-lasting software-intensive systems, useful in a wide range of blockchain applications. The major parts of our proposal deal with deployment of security-assurance tasks, as well as through architecting the built-in security enhancement features.Several recent incidents are indicative of our vulnerability in the age of digital infrastructure, as biomedical, energy distribution, and aerospace areas increasingly rely on digital infrastructure, the failures can be catastrophic to public safety. With increases in complexity and scope, the likelihood of system failures will only increase, yet the increased integration also makes security even more taxing in terms of time and money. Given this, our proposal is timely, with long-term benefits to both wider society and the industrial partner.