Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Transactional properties of permissioned blockchains

  • Special Issue Paper
  • Published:
SICS Software-Intensive Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Traditional distributed transaction processing (TP) systems, such as replicated databases, faced difficulties in getting wide adoption for scenarios of enterprise integration due to the level of mutual trust required. Ironically, public blockchains, which promised to solve the problem of mutual trust in collaborative processes, suffer from issues like scalability, probabilistic transaction finality, and lack of data confidentiality. To tackle these issues, permissioned blockchains were introduced as an alternative approach combining the positives of the two worlds and avoiding their drawbacks. However, no sufficient analysis has been done to emphasize their actual capabilities regarding TP. In this paper, we identify a suitable collection of TP criteria to analyze permissioned blockchains and apply them to a prominent set of these systems. Finally, we compare the derived properties and provide general conclusions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In fact Bitcoin supports a limited scripting language that allows even more sophisticated programs.

  2. Aura-Authority Round-Wiki. https://wiki.parity.io/Aura. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

  3. Quorum wiki. https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/wiki. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

  4. Raft-based consensus for Ethereum/Quorum. https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/blob/master/docs/Consensus/raft.md. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

  5. Chain Protocol Whitepaper. https://chain.com/docs/1.2/protocol/papers/whitepaper. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

  6. Hyperledger Sawtooth documentation. https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

  7. BigchainDB documentation. https://docs.bigchaindb.com/en/latest/. Accessed 14 Aug 2019.

References

  1. Androulaki E et al (2018) Hyperledger Fabric: a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. In: Proceedings of the thirteenth EuroSys conference. ACM, pp 30:1–30:15

  2. Angelis SD, Aniello L, Baldoni R, Lombardi F, Margheri A, Sassone V (2018) PBFT vs proof-of-authority: applying the CAP theorem to permissioned blockchain. In: Italian conference on cyber security. University of Southampton, p 11

  3. Bernstein PA, Newcomer E (2009) Principles of transaction processing, 2nd edn. The Morgan Kaufmann series in data management systems. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco

  4. Birman K (2007) The promise, and limitations, of gossip protocols. SIGOPS Oper Syst Rev 41(5):8–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Buchman E, Kwon J, Milosevic Z (2018) The latest gossip on BFT consensus. arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.04938

  6. Cachin C, Vukolic M (2017) Blockchain consensus protocols in the wild (keynote talk). In: DISC 2017, Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, (LIPIcs), vol 91, pp 1:1–1:16

  7. Castro M, Liskov B (2002) Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM TOCS 20(4):398–461

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Chase B, MacBrough E (2018) Analysis of the XRP Ledger consensus protocol. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.07242

  9. Correia A et al (2010) Practical database replication. Springer, Berlin, pp 253–285

    Book  Google Scholar 

  10. Croman K et al (2016) On scaling decentralized blockchains. In: Financial cryptography and data security. Springer, Berlin, pp 106–125

  11. Dwork C, Goldberg A, Naor M (2003) On memory-bound functions for fighting spam. In: CRYPTO 2003. Springer, Berlin, pp 426–444

  12. Greenspan G (2015) MultiChain private blockchain. White Paper. https://www.multichain.com/white-paper/

  13. Guerraoui R, Knežević N, Quéma V, Vukolić M (2010) The next 700 BFT protocols. In: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on computer systems, EuroSys’10. ACM, pp 363–376

  14. Haerder T, Reuter A (1983) Principles of transaction-oriented database recovery. ACM CSUR 15(4):287–317

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Kemme B, Jiménez-Peris R, Patiño-Martínez M, Alonso G (2010) Database replication: a tutorial, chap 12. Springer, Berlin, pp 219–252

  16. Lin YT (2017) Istanbul Byzantine fault tolerance. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/650

  17. Nakamoto S (2008) Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. White Paper

  18. Qiu D, Srikant R (2004) Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks. SIGCOMM Comput Commun Rev 34(4):367–378

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Sousa J, Bessani A, Vukolic M (2018) A byzantine fault-tolerant ordering service for the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform. In: 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP international conference on dependable systems and networks (DSN), pp 51–58

  20. Szilagyi P (2017) Clique PoA protocol & Rinkeby PoA testnet. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/225

  21. Tai S, Eberhardt J, Klems M (2017) Not ACID, not BASE, but SALT—a transaction processing perspective on blockchains. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on cloud computing and services science. SciTePress, pp 755–764

  22. Wood G (2018) Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger—Byzantium version. White Paper

  23. Xu X, Pautasso C et al (2016) The blockchain as a software connector. In: 13th Working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture, pp 182–191

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by the Ministry of Science of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, for the Doctoral Program “Services Computing”.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Architecture of Application Systems, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Ghareeb Falazi, Uwe Breitenbücher & Frank Leymann

  2. Diconium Digital Solutions GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany

    Vikas Khinchi

Authors
  1. Ghareeb Falazi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Vikas Khinchi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Uwe Breitenbücher
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Frank Leymann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ghareeb Falazi.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Falazi, G., Khinchi, V., Breitenbücher, U. et al. Transactional properties of permissioned blockchains. SICS Softw.-Inensiv. Cyber-Phys. Syst. 35, 49–61 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-019-00411-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-019-00411-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation