Titulo Estágio
Secure and connect smart-contracts to the outside world
Local do Estágio
DEI
Enquadramento
Smart-contracts are an emerging and promising blockchain technology with a vast set of use cases; Like electronic voting, storage for real estate property records, decentralized finance (DeFi), industrial manufacturing, and many more. The technology is increasing in attraction every year, mainly due to companies and investors starting to see business opportunities in decentralized systems.
Smart-contracts adoption is increasing, which forces the technology to become more robust and feature-rich. A well-known limitation is that smart-contracts do not have direct access to real-world information (e.g., weather forecasts, stocks, fiat prices, etc.). This limitation makes it very difficult for entities to use smart-contract technologies when their operations rely on off-chain information.
Objetivo
This project aims to research and implement secure, reliable, and cost-effective solutions to allow smart-contracts to access and use real-world information from within blockchain systems. In a more detailed resume, this project focuses on identifying solutions to decentralize the provision of off-chain information through the use of agents (Oracles) that gather and verify real-world data that can then be used by smart-contracts. The cost-effective means that the solutions should look into approaches that allow for lower gas and storage consumption, resulting in lower transaction fees and letting the contracts run indefinitely without being locked due to consumption limits. The idea is to increase decentralization by having pools of oracles provisioning and aggregating data on-demand or between specific time intervals. (e.g., calculating the deviation of all inputs and reject results that surpass a certain deviation threshold). Security is fundamental to prevent the loss of funds and the falsy provision of information.
The project idea comes from a ChainLink grant to the SmartPy.io platform. The grant consists of adding support for ChainLink oracles in the Tezos blockchain.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
• T1: Research the state-of-the-art in blockchain technologies, mainly focus- ing on smart-contracts, oracle solutions, vulnerabilities, gas consumption, and decentralized finance;
• T2: Analyze possible problems in blockchain systems that can exist when accessing off-chain information and identify solutions for them.
• T3: Define the architecture and security model for the software infras- tructure;
• T4: Design secure and reliable oracle workflows:
– Define data models for the smart-contracts;
– Specify the interfaces (entry-points) that will allow smart-contracts
to call each other;
– Define how multi signatures will be used to improve the integrity of the solution;
– Design control flow graphs to describe the behavior of the entry- points and facilitate the testing phase;
• T5: Write the intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
• T6: Prepare a blockchain sandbox to be used during the solution imple- mentation;
• T7: Adopt and implement agents capable of listening to smart-contracts and dispatch actions to other smart-contracts accordingly;
• T8: Develop smart-contracts based on the design conducted on T4;
• T9: Implement unit and integration tests against the solution to identify possible vulnerabilities. The student is advised to practice test-driven development from the beginning.
• T10 Write the thesis.
Condições
A work place will be provided to the student.
Observações
n/a
Orientador
Fernando Boavida
boavida@dei.uc.pt 📩