Black Block Recorder: Immutable Black Box Logging for Robots via Blockchain

Abstract

Logging plays a crucial role in robotic research, providing prolonged insight into a robots encountered environmental stimuli, internal behavioral state, and performance or outcome of actions taken; all necessary for profiling and debugging robotic application ex post facto. As robotic development matures into production, logging assumes an additional role in equipping auditors with the evidence necessary for investigating issues, accidents or fraud. Given robotic sectors such as drone delivery or autonomous transport must operate in the open world, ensuring the integrity, authenticity and non-repudiation of generated logs on these mobile cyberphical systems presents new threats that extend beyond those in traditional IT computing: such as physical system access or postmortem collusion between robot and OEM resulting in the truncation or alteration of previous records. In this work, we address the topic of immutabilized logs using integrity proofs and distributed ledgers with the additional consideration for mobile and public service robotic applications.

Towards Managing Industrial Robot Fleets with Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain and ROS 2

“…The key properties from blockchain systems that can be leveraged in distributed multi-robot systems are built-in security aiding in data sharing within networked systems [18], immutability of the data enabling auditability [19], and consensus protocols enabling collaborative decision-making through smart contracts [20], [21].…”

“…An early integration of blockchain focused around the data immutability properties is the Black Block Recorder (BBR) [19]. In this approach, distributed ledgers were leveraged for integrity proofs to enable tamper-evident logging, while considering the limited resources available for mobile robotic deployments.…”

“…In the figure, we have listed the most significant applications of smart contracts for industrial robot fleets. First, as identified already in the literature [19], the ledger can be used to store immutable records of data, either sample sensor data or other standard ROS data types, for example. An example of an application for such a purpose is illustrated in Algorithm 1 Real-time processed data can also be stored through smart contracts to trigger predefined actions at other modules.…”

Fine-Grained Access Control-Enabled Logging Method on ARM TrustZone

“…Recently, researchers have investigated blockchain technology as one way to make logs more reliable. White et al generated immutable logs by using Enclave and sending checkpoints-a digest of logs-to an external blockchain [17]. Since these proposed methods do not support one-to-many encryption, as once encryption, many users are unable to utilize the encrypted data in various places and do not support efficient access control mechanisms to logs.…”

A Blockchain-Controlled Physical Robot Swarm Communicating via an Ad-Hoc Network

“…The field of blockchain-based swarm robotics was set out in 2016 by [3]; the paper describes several use cases for blockchain-controlled robot swarms. Since 2018 there has been a number of simulation results for blockchain applications in robots such as: the achievement of consensus in robot swarms in the presence of Byzantine robots [15]; the improvement of communications and performance in industrial robots [5]; the formation of coalitions in cyber-physical systems [9]; the management of collaboration in heterogeneous multirobot systems [14]; the secure collection of data from robots [20]; and path planning in multi-robot systems [11]. Hence, research addressing the application of blockchain technology to robotics is an active research area and, as such, there is a high demand for platforms to run blockchain experiments on physical robots.…”