【Author】
Su, Hong; Guo, Bing; Shen, Yan; Li, Tao; Qing, Chaoxia; Zhang, Zhen
【Source】IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER COMMUNICATIONS WORKSHOPS (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
【Abstract】Smart contract helps to broaden the application of blockchain to various fields. In many cases, the non-blockchain systems (NBS) are involved. However, when a smart contract directly interacts with NBS, there is a non-deterministic issue (or a state conflict issue). The reason is that different nodes may obtain different statuses of NBS when the state changes in NBS. If we can solve this issue, a smart contract can be used to interact with current systems without an additional adaptor or bridge required by the existing solutions. In this paper, we regard the states of NBS as a sequence of states instead of a single state and propose to solve the non-deterministic issue by state synchronization. Blockchain nodes synchronize the state of the non-blockchain server via the P2P protocol. The state synchronization has requirements for both blockchain and NBS. For blockchain, it should provide the mechanism to synchronize states obtained from NBS. For NBS, it should sign the query result with a timestamp; the signature prevents the cheat of the observer (the blockchain), and the timestamp ensures the order of a state in the state sequence. At last, we show our verification results with respect to our proposed model and method.
【Keywords】Smart contract; non-blockchain systems; non-deterministic issue; state synchronization
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