Reliable Decentralized Oracle with Mechanisms for Verification and Disputation

Smart contract using Blockchain technology provides a mechanism to automatically exchange cash and service according to programmed conditions without requiring reliable third-party intervention. This results in reduction of time and cost for complex contract execution. Some contract execution require external information outside Blockchain as a trigger to execute the code specifying process for a certain contract. However, because Blockchain technology itself does not provide a function to directly access such external information, these applications require a proxy system called oracle. Oracle is in charge accessing external information, to verify it, and to write it on Blockchain. To avoid security incidents such as oracle writing malicious information on Blockchain, reliability of oracle must be required. This paper introduces a decentralized oracle equipping with verification and disputation mechanisms. To evaluate reliability of the proposed mechanisms, a simulation-based experiment was conducted. The experimental results showed that our solution could effectively suppress the interference of malicious participants and obtained reliable consensus results even if relatively many malicious participants joined in the consensus process on the proposed decentralized oracle.