In this paper, we demonstrate how Hyperledger Fabric, one of the most popular permissioned blockchains, can benefit from network-attached acceleration. The scalability and peak performance of Fabric is primarily limited by the bottlenecks present in its block validation/commit phase. We propose Blockchain Machine, a hardware accelerator coupled with a hardware-friendly communication protocol, to act as the validator peer. It can be adapted to applications and their smart contracts, and is targeted for a server with network-attached FPGA acceleration card. The Blockchain Machine retrieves blocks and their transactions in hardware directly from the network interface, which are then validated through a configurable and efficient block-level and transaction-level pipeline. The validation results are then transferred to the host CPU where non-bottleneck operations are executed. From our implementation integrated with Fabric v1.4 LTS, we observed up to 12x speedup in block validation when compared to software-only validator peer, with commit throughput of up to 68,900 tps. Our work provides an acceleration platform that will foster further research on hardware acceleration of permissioned blockchains.
Hyperledger Fabric is a popular open-source project for deploying permissioned blockchains. Many performance characteristics of the latest Hyperledger Fabric, such as performance characteristics of each phase, the impacts of ordering services, and bottleneck and scalability, are still not well understood due to the performance complexity of distributed systems. We conducted a thorough performance evaluation on the first long term support release of Hyperledger Fabric. We studied the performance characteristics of each phase, including execute, order, and the validate phase, according to Hyperl…
Blockchain technologies are on the rise, and Hyperledger Fabric is one of the most popular permissioned blockchain platforms. In this paper, we re-architect the validation phase of Fabric based on our analysis from fine-grained breakdown of the validation phase's latency. Our optimized validation phase uses a chaincode cache during validation of transactions, initiates state database reads in parallel with validation of transactions, and writes to the ledger and databases in parallel. Our experiments reveal performance improvements of 2x for CouchDB and 1.3x for LevelDB. Notably, our optimizat…
Blockchain technologies are expected to make a significant impact on a variety of industries. However, one issue holding them back is their limited transaction throughput, especially compared to established solutions such as distributed database systems. In this paper, we re-architect a modern permissioned blockchain system, Hyperledger Fabric, to increase transaction throughput from 3,000 to 20,000 transactions per second. We focus on performance bottlenecks beyond the consensus mechanism, and we propose architectural changes that reduce computation and I/O overhead during transaction orderin…
Blockchain applications may offer better fault-tolerance, integrity, traceability and transparency compared to centralized solutions. Despite these benefits, few businesses switch to blockchain-based applications. Industries worry that the current blockchain implementations do not meet their requirements, e.g., when it comes to scalability, throughput or latency. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a permissioned blockchain infrastructure that aims to meet enterprise needs and provides a highly modular and well-conceived architecture. In this paper, we survey and analyse requirements of blockchain app…
This work aims to provide a more secure access control in Hyperledger Fabric blockchain by combining multiple ID's, attributes, and policies with the components that regulate access control. The access control system currently used by Hyperledger Fabric is first completely analyzed. Next, a new implementation is proposed that builds upon the existing solution but provides users and developers with easier ways to make access control decisions based on combinations of multiple ID's, attributes, and policies. Our proposed implementation encapsulates the Fabric CA client to facilitate attribute ad…
The rise in popularity of permissioned blockchain platforms in recent time is significant. Hyperledger Fabric is one such permissioned blockchain platform and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. The Fabric comprises various components such as smart-contracts, endorsers, committers, validators, and orderers. As the performance of blockchain platform is a major concern for enterprise applications, in this work, we perform a comprehensive empirical study to characterize the performance of Hyperledger Fabric and identify potential performance bottlenecks to gain a bette…
Hyperledger Fabric is a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains hosted by the Linux Foundation. It is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications at enterprise grade scale. To achieve this, Hyperledger Fabric introduces a novel execute-order-validate blockchain architecture, allowing parallelization of transaction execution and validation. However, this raises the need for transaction isolation. Today transaction isolation is attained by locking the entire state database during simulation of transactions and database updates. This lock is…
Permissioned blockchain systems promise to provide both decentralized trust and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric is currently one of the most wide-spread permissioned blockchain systems and is heavily promoted both in industry and academia. Due to its optimistic concurrency model, the transaction failure rates in Fabric can become a bottleneck. While there is active research to reduce failures, there is a lack of understanding on their root cause and, consequently, a lack of guidelines on how to configure Fabric optimally for different scenarios. To close this gap, in this paper, we first introduce…
Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, becomes more and more popular in both industry and academia. Each peer in blockchain system maintains a copy of ledger and makes sure of data consistency through consensus protocol. Blockchain system can provide many benefits such as immutability, transparency and security. Hyperledger Fabric is permissioned blockchain platform hosted by Linux foundation. Fabric has various components such as peer, ordering service, chaincode and state database. The structure of Fabric network is very complicated to provide reliable permissioned blockchain servic…
The rapid growth of blockchain systems leads to increasing interest in understanding and comparing blockchain performance at scale. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the performance of Hyperledger Fabric v1.1 - one of the most popular permissioned blockchain systems. Prior works have analyzed Hyperledger Fabric v0.6 in depth, but newer versions of the system undergo significant changes that warrant new analysis. Existing works on benchmarking the system are limited in their scope: some consider only small networks, others consider scalability of only parts of the system instead of the whole…
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise grade permissioned distributed ledger platform that offers modularity for a broad set of industry use cases. One modular component is a pluggable ordering service that establishes consensus on the order of transactions and batches them into blocks. However, as of the time of this writing, there is no production grade Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) ordering service for Fabric, with the latest version (v2.1) supporting only Crash Fault-Tolerance (CFT). In our work, we address crucial aspects of BFT integration into Fabric that were left unsolved in all prior w…
Various start-up developers and academic researchers have investigated the usage of blockchain as a data storage medium due to the advantages offered by its tamper-proof and decentralized nature. However, there have not been many attempts to provide a standard platform for virtually storing the states of unique tangible entities and their subsequent modifications. In this paper, we propose NFTracer, a non-fungible token tracking proof-of-concept based on Hyperledger Composer and Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain. To achieve the capabilities of our platform, we use NFTracer to build an artwork auct…
Private permissioned blockchains are deployed in ever greater numbers to facilitate cross-organizational processes in various industries, particularly in supply chain management. One popular example of this trend is Hyperledger Fabric. Compared to public permissionless blockchains, it promises improved performance and provides certain features that address key requirements of enterprises. However, also permissioned blockchains are still not as scalable as centralized systems, and due to the scarcity of theoretical results and empirical data, their real-world performance cannot be predicted wit…
Hyperledger Fabric is a popular permissioned blockchain system that features a highly modular and extensible system for deploying permissioned blockchains which are expected to have a major effect on a wide range of sectors. Unlike traditional blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric uses the EOV model for transaction processing: the submitted transactions are executed by the endorsing peer, ordered and batched by the ordering services, and validated by the validating peers. Due to this EOV workflow, a well-documented issue that arises is the multi-version concurrenc…
Blockchain is one of the most popular distributed ledger technologies. It can solve the trust issue among enterprises. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain aiming at enterprise-grade business applications. However, compared to traditional distributed database solutions, one issue of blockchain based application development is the limited data access. For Fabric, the ledger data can only be retrieved by limited interfaces provided by Fabric SDKs or chaincode. In order to meet the requirements of data query and provide flexible query functions for real applications built on Fabric, th…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine repli…
Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurr…
Within the last few years, a countless number of blockchain systems have emerged on the market, each one claiming to revolutionize the way of distributed transaction processing in one way or the other. Many blockchain features, such as byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), are indeed valuable additions in modern environments. However, despite all the hype around the technology, many of the challenges that blockchain systems have to face are fundamental transaction management problems. These are largely shared with traditional database systems, which have been around for decades already. These simil…
Permissioned blockchains are supported by identified but individually untrustworthy nodes, collectively maintaining a replicated ledger whose content is trusted. The Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain system targets high-throughput transaction processing. Fabric uses a set of nodes tasked with the ordering of transactions using consensus. Additional peers endorse and validate transactions, and maintain a copy of the ledger. The ability to quickly disseminate new transaction blocks from ordering nodes to all peers is critical for both performance and consistency. Broadcast is handled by…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), one of the most popular private blockchains, has recently received attention for blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT). However, for IoT applications to handle time-sensitive data, the processing latency in HLF has emerged as a new challenge. In this article, therefore, we establish a practical HLF latency model for HLF-enabled IoT. We first discuss the structure and transaction flow of HLF-enabled IoT. After implementing real HLF, we capture the latencies that each transaction experiences and show that the total latency of HLF can be modeled as a Gamma distribu…
The paper suggests a new approach based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts to creation of a distributed system for managing provenance metadata, as well as access rights to data in distributed storages, which is fault-tolerant, safe and secure from the point of view of preservation of metadata records from accidental or intentional distortions. The implementation of the proposed approach is based on the permissioned blockchains and on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform in conjunction with Hyperledger Composer.
Permissioned blockchains are becoming popular as data management systems in the enterprise setting. Compared to traditional distributed databases, blockchain platforms provide increased security guarantees but significantly lower performance. Further, these platforms are quite expensive to run for the low throughput they provide. The following are two ways to improve performance and reduce cost: (1) make the system utilize allocated resources efficiently; (2) allow rapid and dynamic scaling of allocated resources based on load. We explore both of these in this work. We first investigate the re…
A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, for executing applications that demand privacy. Untrusted blockchain nodes cannot get access to the data and computations inside the TEE. This paper first explores some pitfalls that arise from the combination of TEEs with blockchains. Since TEEs are, in principle, stateless they are susceptible to rollback attacks, which should be prevented to maintain …
A new framework for a secure and robust consensus in blockchain-based IoT networks is proposed using machine learning. Hyperledger fabric, which is a blockchain platform developed as part of the Hyperledger project, though looks very apt for IoT applications, has comparatively low tolerance for malicious activities in an untrustworthy environment. To that end, we propose AI-enabled blockchain (AIBC) with a 2-step consensus protocol that uses an outlier detection algorithm for consensus in an IoT network implemented on hyperledger fabric platform. The outlier-aware consensus protocol exploits a…
Ride-hailing and ride-sharing applications have recently gained popularity as a convenient alternative to traditional modes of travel. Current research into autonomous vehicles is accelerating rapidly and will soon become a critical component of a ride-hailing platforms architecture. Implementing an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing platform proves a difficult challenge due to the centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing architectures. In a traditional ride-hailing environment the drivers operate their own personal vehicles so it follows that a fleet of autonomous vehicles would be require…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a modular and extensible permissioned blockchain platform released to open-source and hosted by the Linux Foundation. The platform's design exhibits principles required by enterprise grade business applications like supply-chains, financial transactions, asset management, food safety, and many more. For that end HLF introduces several innovations, two of which are smart contracts in general purpose languages (\emph{chaincode} in HLF), and flexible endorsement policies, which govern whether a transaction is considered valid. Typical blockchain applications are compri…
As a highly scalable permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric supports a wide range of industry use cases ranging from governance to finance. In this paper, we propose a model to analyze the performance of a Hyperledgerbased system by using Generalised Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPN). This model decomposes a transaction flow into multiple phases and provides a simulation-based approach to obtain the system latency and throughput with a specific arrival rate. Based on this model, we analyze the impact of different configurations of ordering service on system performance to find out the…
Enterprises have paid attention to consortium blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric, which is one of the most promising platforms, for efficient decentralized transactions without depending on any particular organization. A consortium blockchain-based system will be typically built across multiple organizations. In such blockchain-based systems, system operations across multiple organizations in a decentralized manner are essential to maintain the value of introducing consortium blockchains. Decentralized system operations have recently been becoming realistic with the evolution of consortium bl…
As the commercial use of 5G technologies has grown more prevalent, smart vehicles have become an efficient platform for delivering a wide array of services directly to customers. The vehicular crowdsourcing service (VCS), for example, can provide immediate and timely feedback to the user regarding real-time transportation information. However, different sources can generate spurious information towards a specific service request in the pursuit of profit. Distinguishing trusted information from numerous sources is the key to a reliable VCS platform. This paper proposes a solution to this proble…
Smart contracts have enabled blockchain systems to evolve from simple cryptocurrency platforms, such as Bitcoin, to general transactional systems, such as Ethereum. Catering for emerging business requirements, a new architecture called execute-order-validate has been proposed in Hyperledger Fabric to support parallel transactions and improve the blockchain's throughput. However, this new architecture might render many invalid transactions when serializing them. This problem is further exaggerated as the block formation rate is inherently limited due to other factors beside data processing, suc…
Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By introducing a small amount of trust in their participants, permissioned blockchain systems such as Hyperledger Fabric can benefit from more efficient consensus algorithms and make use of parallel pre-order execution on a subset of network nodes. Fabric, in particular, has been shown to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. However, this performance is o…
Blockchain-based federated learning has gained significant interest over the last few years with the increasing concern for data privacy, advances in machine learning, and blockchain innovation. However, gaps in security and scalability hinder the development of real-world applications. In this study, we propose ScaleSFL, which is a scalable blockchain-based sharding solution for federated learning. ScaleSFL supports interoperability by separating the off-chain federated learning component in order to verify model updates instead of controlling the entire federated learning flow. We implemente…
Permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric have become quite popular for implementation of enterprise applications. Recent research has mainly focused on improving performance of permissioned blockchains without any consideration of their power/energy consumption. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to understand energy efficiency (throughput/energy) of validator peer in Hyperledger Fabric (a major bottleneck node). We pick a number of optimizations for validator peer from literature (allocated CPUs, software block cache and FPGA based accelerator). First, we propos…
Scalability remains one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of permissioned blockchain technologies for large-scale deployments. Permissioned blockchains typically exhibit low latencies, compared to permissionless deployments -- however at the cost of poor scalability. Various solutions were proposed to capture "the best of both worlds", targeting low latency and high scalability simultaneously, the most prominent technique being blockchain sharding. However, most existing sharding proposals exploit features of the permissionless model and are therefore restricted to cryptocurrency appli…
The maturing of blockchain technology leads to heterogeneity, where multiple solutions specialize in a particular use case. While the development of different blockchain networks shows great potential for blockchains, the isolated networks have led to data and asset silos, limiting the applications of this technology. Blockchain interoperability solutions are essential to enable distributed ledgers to reach their full potential. Such solutions allow blockchains to support asset and data transfer, resulting in the development of innovative applications. This paper proposes a novel blockchain in…
The increasing amount of personal data is raising serious issues in the context of privacy, security, and data ownership. Entities whose data are being collected can benefit from mechanisms to manage the parties that can access their data and to audit who has accessed their data. Consent management systems address these issues. We present Consentio, a scalable consent management system based on the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain. The data management challenge we address is to ensure high throughput and low latency of endorsing data access requests and granting or revoking consent. …
Permissioned blockchains promise secure decentralized data management in business-to-business use-cases. In contrast to Bitcoin and similar public blockchains which rely on Proof-of-Work for consensus and are deployed on thousands of geo-distributed nodes, business-to-business use-cases (such as supply chain management and banking) require significantly fewer nodes, cheaper consensus, and are often deployed in datacenter-like environments with fast networking. However, permissioned blockchains often follow the architectural thinkining behind their WAN-oriented public relatives, which results i…
Interoperation for data sharing between permissioned blockchain networks relies on networks' abilities to independently authenticate requests and validate proofs accompanying the data; these typically contain digital signatures. This requires counterparty networks to know the identities and certification chains of each other's members, establishing a common trust basis rooted in identity. But permissioned networks are ad hoc consortia of existing organizations, whose network affiliations may not be well-known or well-established even though their individual identities are. In this paper, we de…
Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to tr…
Off-grid networks are recently emerging as a solution to connect the unconnected or provide alternative services to networks of possibly untrusted participants. The systems currently used, however, exhibit limitations due to their centralized nature and thus prove inadequate to secure trust. Blockchain technology can be the tool that will enable trust and transparency in such networks. In this paper, we introduce a platform for secure and privacy-respecting decentralized data sharing among untrusted participants in off-grid networks. The proposed architecture realizes this goal via the integra…
Since Bitcoin was first introduced in 2008, many types of cryptocurrencies have been proposed based on blockchain. However, the performance of permissionless blockchains restricts the widespread of cryptocurrency. Recently, Libra was proposed by Facebook based on a permissioned blockchain, i.e. the Libra blockchain. The vision of Libra is to become a global currency supporting financial applications, but it is doubted whether the performance of the Libra blockchain is able to support frequent micropayment scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology to evaluate the performance of blockch…
