Reliability Analysis of Smart Contract Execution Architectures: A Comparative Simulation Study

TL;DR

This paper compares two smart contract execution architectures, Order-Execute and Execute-Order-Validate, through simulation of an IoT energy case study, finding the latter more reliable and secure.

Contribution

It introduces an evaluation model for assessing smart contract security and provides a comparative simulation analysis of different execution architectures.

Findings

Execute-Order-Validate architecture shows higher reliability.

Simulation reveals vulnerabilities in traditional architectures.

The study offers insights for designing secure smart contract systems.

Abstract

The industrial market continuously needs reliable solutions to secure autonomous systems. Especially as these systems become more complex and interconnected, reliable security solutions are becoming increasingly important. One promising solution to tackle this challenge is using smart contracts designed to meet contractual conditions, avoid malicious errors, secure exchanges, and minimize the need for reliable intermediaries. However, smart contracts are immutable. Moreover, there are different smart contract execution architectures (namely Order-Execute and Execute-Order-Validate) that have different throughputs. In this study, we developed an evaluation model for assessing the security of reliable smart contract execution. We then developed a realistic smart contract enabled IoT energy case study. Finally, we simulate the developed case study to evaluate several smart contract security vulnerabilities reported in the literature. Our results show that the Execute-Order-Validate architecture is more promising regarding reliability and security.