AGChain: A Blockchain-based Gateway for Trustworthy App Delegation from Mobile App Markets

TL;DR

AGChain is a blockchain-based gateway that enhances trust, security, and decentralization for app delegation in mobile app markets, reducing costs and improving performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain gateway for trustworthy app delegation, addressing cost, security, and storage challenges in mobile app markets.

Findings

Achieved a minimal gas cost of around 0.002 USD per app upload.

Demonstrated effective security and decentralization on Ethereum and Polygon.

Maintained an average system overhead of 12%.

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones has led to the growth of mobile app markets, creating a need for enhanced transparency, global access, and secure downloading. This paper introduces AGChain, a blockchain-based gateway that enables trustworthy app delegation within existing markets. AGChain ensures that markets can continue providing services while users benefit from permanent, distributed, and secure app delegation. During its development, we address two key challenges: significantly reducing smart contract gas costs and enabling fully distributed IPFS-based file storage. Additionally, we tackle three system issues related to security and sustainability. We have implemented a prototype of AGChain on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, achieving effective security and decentralization with a minimal gas cost of around 0.002 USD per app upload (no cost for app download). The system also exhibits reasonable performance with an average overhead of 12%.