Diamond Accountability Model for Blockchain-enabled Cyber-Physical Systems

Blockchain has the capacity to transform the industries disruptively as it presents new features like smart contracts, tokenization of content, eliminating counterfeit products, supply chain improvement, digital twins, and end-to-end security. This letter presents a Diamond Accountability Model (DAM) where a public or private authority is included in the blockchain transactions providing non-repudiation of digital transactions, holistic security and effective governance. The proposed technique aims to present a decentralized solution for multi-agent applications where many partnering organizations have to collaborate without suffering from the security, accountability, maintenance, scalability, and integrity problems over distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS). The proposed scheme positions authorities also in the chain that enables additional accountability and trust. The scheme proposes a verification mechanism where the authorized organizations are also included in the verification of transactions over the blockchain. In order to elucidate, a conceptual use case is presented where at least two partnering organizations collaborate with each other within a decentralized but also authorized blockchain-enabled scheme.