A Blockchain-based Decentralized Electronic Marketplace for Computing Resources

We propose a framework for building a decentralized electronic marketplace for computing resources. The idea is that anyone with spare capacities can offer them on this marketplace, opening up the cloud computing market to smaller players, thus creating a more competitive environment compared to today’s market consisting of a few large providers. Trust is a crucial component in making an anonymized decentralized marketplace a reality. We develop protocols that enable participants to interact with each other in a fair way and show how these protocols can be implemented using smart contracts and blockchains. We discuss and evaluate our framework not only from a technical point of view, but also look at the wider context in terms of fair interactions and legal implications.

[1]  E. Weyl,et al.  A Price Theory of Multi-Sided Platforms , 2009 .

[2]  Jerry Kaplan,et al.  Artificial intelligence , 2016, Commun. ACM.

[3]  Fan Zhang,et al.  Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts , 2016, CCS.

[4]  Paolo Falcarin,et al.  Integrity Checking in Remote Computation , 2005 .

[5]  Silvio Micali,et al.  Simple and fast optimistic protocols for fair electronic exchange , 2003, PODC '03.

[6]  Sven Helmer,et al.  A Container-Based Edge Cloud PaaS Architecture Based on Raspberry Pi Clusters , 2016, 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW).

[7]  Florian Schmidt,et al.  My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container , 2017, SOSP.

[8]  Zygmunt J. Haas,et al.  A Practical, Secure, and Verifiable Cloud Computing for Mobile Systems , 2014, FNC/MobiSPC.

[9]  Sven Helmer,et al.  A Performance Exploration of Architectural Options for a Middleware for Decentralised Lightweight Edge Cloud Architectures , 2018, IoTBDS.

[10]  David J. Scott,et al.  Unikernels: the rise of the virtual library operating system , 2013, CACM.

[11]  Bud Mishra,et al.  Deception, identity, and security , 2018, Commun. ACM.

[12]  Mariana Raykova,et al.  RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding , 2018, CCS.

[13]  Chris GauthierDickey,et al.  Result verification and trust-based scheduling in peer-to-peer grids , 2005, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P'05).

[14]  Algirdas Avizienis An Immune System Paradigm for the Design of Fault Tolerant Systems , 2002, EDCC.

[15]  Arvind Narayanan,et al.  Escrow Protocols for Cryptocurrencies: How to Buy Physical Goods Using Bitcoin , 2017, Financial Cryptography.

[16]  Riikka Koulu Three Quests for Justification in the ODR Era: Sovereignty, Contract and Quality Standards , 2014 .

[17]  Bud Mishra,et al.  Identity Deception and Game Deterrence via Signaling Games , 2016, EAI Endorsed Trans. Security Safety.

[18]  Achim Streit,et al.  Sandboxing of biomedical applications in Linux containers based on system call evaluation , 2018, Concurr. Comput. Pract. Exp..

[19]  Anna Riikka Koulu Blockchains and Online Dispute Resolution: Smart Contracts as an Alternative to Enforcement , 2016 .

[20]  Alan Mislove,et al.  Bazaar: Strengthening User Reputations in Online Marketplaces , 2011, NSDI.

[21]  George Danezis,et al.  Consensus in the Age of Blockchains , 2017, ArXiv.

[22]  Alex Stephany,et al.  The Business of Sharing , 2015 .

[23]  Craig Gentry,et al.  Non-interactive Verifiable Computing: Outsourcing Computation to Untrusted Workers , 2010, CRYPTO.

[24]  Andrew Warfield,et al.  Xen and the art of virtualization , 2003, SOSP '03.

[25]  Carsten Lund,et al.  Proof verification and the hardness of approximation problems , 1998, JACM.

[26]  Peter Bailis,et al.  Research for practice , 2018, Commun. ACM.

[27]  Arvind Narayanan,et al.  Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies - A Comprehensive Introduction , 2016 .

[28]  Jeremy Clark,et al.  Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree , 2017, ACM Queue.

[29]  Kyle Chard,et al.  Co-Operative Resource Allocation: Building an Open Cloud Market Using Shared Infrastructure , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.

[30]  Andrew J. Blumberg,et al.  Verifying computations without reexecuting them , 2015, Commun. ACM.

[31]  Alptekin Küpçü,et al.  Usable optimistic fair exchange , 2010, Comput. Networks.

[32]  J ScottDavid,et al.  Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System , 2013 .

[33]  H. Kopetz,et al.  The Evolution of Fault-Tolerant Computing , 1987, Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerant Systems.

[34]  Masaru Fukushi,et al.  Generalized Spot-Checking for Sabotage-Tolerance in Volunteer Computing Systems , 2010, 2010 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing.

[35]  Paul Resnick,et al.  Trust among strangers in internet transactions: Empirical analysis of eBay' s reputation system , 2002, The Economics of the Internet and E-commerce.

[36]  Nouman M. Durrani,et al.  Volunteer computing: requirements, challenges, and solutions , 2014, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[37]  Srinivas Devadas,et al.  Beaver: A Decentralized Anonymous Marketplace with Secure Reputation , 2016, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[38]  Achim Streit,et al.  Fine-Grained Supervision and Restriction of Biomedical Applications in Linux Containers , 2017, 2017 17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID).

[39]  Carsten Lund,et al.  Proof verification and hardness of approximation problems , 1992, Proceedings., 33rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[40]  Bruce Schneier,et al.  Applied cryptography : protocols, algorithms, and source codein C , 1996 .

[41]  Benoît Garbinato,et al.  Impossibility Results on Fair Exchange , 2010, IICS.

[42]  Jan Camenisch,et al.  Optimistic Fair Secure Computation , 2000, CRYPTO.

[43]  Alex Stephany,et al.  The Business of Sharing: Making it in the New Sharing Economy , 2015 .

[44]  Dan Williams,et al.  Unikernels as Processes , 2018, SoCC.

[45]  Yael Tauman Kalai,et al.  Delegating computation: interactive proofs for muggles , 2008, STOC.

[46]  Hemang Subramanian,et al.  Decentralized blockchain-based electronic marketplaces , 2017, Commun. ACM.

[47]  Markus Klems,et al.  Trustless Intermediation in Blockchain-Based Decentralized Service Marketplaces , 2017, ICSOC.

[48]  Dirk Merkel,et al.  Docker: lightweight Linux containers for consistent development and deployment , 2014 .

[49]  Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi,et al.  Token-Based Cloud Computing , 2010, TRUST.

[50]  Chris Dannen,et al.  Introducing Ethereum and Solidity , 2017 .

[51]  Ghassan O. Karame,et al.  Toward Fairness of Cryptocurrency Payments , 2016, IEEE Security & Privacy.

[52]  Marko Grobelnik,et al.  A Capillary Computing Architecture for Dynamic Internet of Things: Orchestration of Microservices from Edge Devices to Fog and Cloud Providers , 2018, Sensors.

[53]  Genaína Nunes Rodrigues,et al.  Statistical analysis of Amazon EC2 cloud pricing models , 2019, Concurr. Comput. Pract. Exp..

[54]  Philippe Golle,et al.  Uncheatable Distributed Computations , 2001, CT-RSA.

[55]  N. Asokan,et al.  Optimistic protocols for fair exchange , 1997, CCS '97.

[56]  Pascal Traverse,et al.  AIRBUS A320/A330/A340 electrical flight controls - A family of fault-tolerant systems , 1993, FTCS-23 The Twenty-Third International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing.

[57]  Keith Mayes,et al.  Optimistic Fair-Exchange with Anonymity for Bitcoin Users , 2014, 2014 IEEE 11th International Conference on e-Business Engineering.

[58]  David P. Anderson,et al.  BOINC: a system for public-resource computing and storage , 2004, Fifth IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing.

[59]  Robert H. Deng,et al.  Efficient and practical fair exchange protocols with off-line TTP , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Cat. No.98CB36186).

[60]  Jason Teutsch,et al.  A scalable verification solution for blockchains , 2019, ArXiv.

[61]  Luis F. G. Sarmenta Sabotage-tolerance mechanisms for volunteer computing systems , 2002, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[62]  Nadarajah Asokan,et al.  Fairness in electronic commerce , 1998, Research report / RZ / IBM / IBM Research Division / Zürich Research Laboratory.

[63]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Cloud Pricing Models , 2019, ACM Comput. Surv..

[64]  Markus Jakobsson,et al.  Ripping Coins For a Fair Exchange , 1995, EUROCRYPT.

[65]  Nitin Naik Docker container-based big data processing system in multiple clouds for everyone , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Systems Engineering Symposium (ISSE).

[66]  Masaru Fukushi,et al.  Adaptive Group-Based Job Scheduling for High Performance and Reliable Volunteer Computing , 2011, J. Inf. Process..

[67]  Kevin W. Hamlen,et al.  Computation Certification as a Service in the Cloud , 2013, 2013 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing.

[68]  Jessie Frazelle Research for practice , 2019, Commun. ACM.

[69]  Hong-Ning Dai,et al.  An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms , 2019, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[70]  Noriyuki Fujimoto,et al.  Computing low latency batches with unreliable workers in volunteer computing environments , 2008, IPDPS.

[71]  Oded Goldreich,et al.  A randomized protocol for signing contracts , 1985, CACM.

[72]  Sanjeev Arora,et al.  Probabilistic checking of proofs: a new characterization of NP , 1998, JACM.

[73]  Toby Murray,et al.  Empirically Analyzing Ethereum's Gas Mechanism , 2019, 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW).

[74]  Thomas Schultz,et al.  Online Dispute Resolution: Challenges for Contemporary Justice , 2004 .

[75]  Jason Teutsch,et al.  Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer , 2015, CCS.

[76]  Kazuo Ohta,et al.  How to simultaneously exchange secrets by general assumptions , 1994, CCS '94.

[77]  Mohammed Essaaidi,et al.  An Efficient Approach to Improve Security for MapReduce Computation in Cloud System , 2018, LOPAL '18.

[78]  Aviv Zohar,et al.  Bitcoin’s Underlying Incentives , 2017, ACM Queue.