FSCC: Flexible Smart Contract Interaction with Access Control for Blockchain

Abstract

Smart contract (SC) is a user-defined program code over blockchain, which holds the characteristics of immutability and auditability without requiring trust third party and is crucial to provide in-network computation for green applications. Herein we investigate the interactions among the SCs, where the functions defined in one SC are called by another one. The existing work, Ethereum name service (ENS), provides a method to map human-readable names to machine-readable addresses. However, it still suffers the problems induced from the ossification of SC, such as no mechanism to call functions in a non-existing SC, to update SC, to acquire the SC information (e.g. contract application binary interface and address), and to achieve access control. To solve these problems, we propose a flexible smart contract interaction framework with access control (FSCC), where SC name and information are separately stored at blockchain and the distributed off-chain storage to reduce on-chain storage overhead. With the FSCC, interactions with non-existing SC, update of SC, and access control of SC can be achieved. Furthermore, performance evaluations show that on-chain storage overhead can be greatly reduced with keeping the communication delay at a low level.