Blockchain-Envisioned Trusted Random Oracles for IoT-Enabled Probabilistic Smart Contracts

In modern decentralized Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based sensor communications, pseudonoise-diffusion oracles are heavily investigated as random oracles for data exchange among peer nodes. As these oracles are generated through algorithmic processes, they pass the standard random tests for finite and bounded intervals only. This ensures a false sense of privacy and confidentiality in exchange through open protocol IoT-stacks in public channels, i.e., Internet. Recently, blockchain (BC)-envisioned random sequences as input oracles are proposed about financial applications, and windfall games like roulette, poker, and lottery. These random inputs exhibit fairness, and nondeterminism in SC executions termed as probabilistic smart contracts (PSCs). However, the IoT-enabled PSC process might be controlled and forged through humans, machines, and bot-nodes through physical and computational methods. Moreover, dishonest entities like contract owners, players, and miners can co-ordinate together to form collusion attacks during consensus to propagate false updates, which ensures forged block additions by miners in BC. Motivated by these facts, in this article, we propose a BC-envisioned IoT-enabled PSC scheme, SaNkhyA, which is executed in three phases. In the first phase, the scheme eliminates colluding dishonest miners through the proposed miner selection algorithm. Then, in the second phase, the elected miners agree through the proposed consensus protocol to generate a stream of random bits. In the third phase, the generated random bit-stream is split through random splitters and fed as input oracles to the proposed PSC among participating entities. In simulation, the scheme ensures a trust probability of 0.38 even at 85% collusion among miners and has an average block processing delay of 1.3 s compared to serial approaches, where the block processing delay is 5.6 s, thereby exhibiting improved scalability. The overall computation and communication cost is 28.48 ms, and 101 bytes, respectively, that indicates the efficacy of the proposed scheme compared to the traditional schemes.

Automated summary

This article proposes a BC-envisioned IoT-enabled PSC scheme, SaNkhyA, which ensures fairness and privacy in transactions through the elimination of dishonest miners, consensus protocol, and random bit-stream splitters, demonstrating good performance in simulations.