Amir M. Ebrahimi, Bram Adams, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan
Software applications that run on a blockchain platform are known as DApps. DApps are built using smart contracts, which are immutable after deployment. Just like any real-world software system, DApps need to receive new features and bug fixes over time in order to remain useful and secure. However, Ethereum lacks native solutions for post-deployment smart contract maintenance, requiring developers to devise their own methods. A popular method is known as the upgradeability proxy contract (UPC), which involves implementing the proxy design pattern (as defined by the Gang of Four). In this method, client calls first hit a proxy contract, which then delegates calls to a certain implementation contract. Most importantly, the proxy contract can be reconfigured during runtime to delegate calls to another implementation contract, effectively enabling application upgrades. For researchers, the accurate detection of UPCs is a strong requirement in the understanding of how exactly real-world DApps are maintained over time. For practitioners, the accurate detection of UPCs is crucial for providing application behavior transparency and enabling auditing. In this paper, we introduce UPC Sentinel, a novel three-layer algorithm that utilizes both static and dynamic analysis of smart contract bytecode to accurately detect active UPCs. We evaluated UPC Sentinel using two distinct ground truth datasets. In the first dataset, our method demonstrated a near-perfect accuracy of 99%. The evaluation on the second dataset further established our method's efficacy, showing a perfect precision rate of 100% and a near-perfect recall of 99.3%, outperforming the state of the art. Finally, we discuss the potential value of UPC Sentinel in advancing future research efforts.
The use of Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) in online market has the potential to address a number of challenges in the field sales and purchase of products online.There are a number of problems associated with buying any product, but luxury or high-end purchases pose additional concerns regarding authenticity.Digital warranties enable customers have greater peace of mind when purchasing luxury items.Additionally, it can offer information about the item's history of purchases, its warranty, and other details.When a customer makes a transaction using our application, the NFT are sent to their account.Asset tokenization, which entails the creation of NFTs that stand in for trading assets, can be a successful strategy to combat fake goods.Digital warranties aid luxury brands in thwarting fakes.Consumers will be able to choose authentic products if these solutions become commonplace in the business and make it clear that products without a guarantee as an NFT are probably not real.On request from a few merchants, assurances will be given to franchises of luxury brands.Additionally, it offers retailers with certified imports from other nations without the express consent of the brand.Luxury brands can organize a consortium in the meanwhile to embrace digital warranty solutions and deal with the industry's counterfeiting problems.This solution is yet to gain momentum among the wider blockchain community, so the challenges persist and remain to be addressed effectively in lieu of the massive potential of the NFTs, the marketplace for which is growing rapidly.
Maintenance is a key factor to ensure the production efficiency, since the occurrence of unexpected failures leads to a degradation of the system performance, causing the loss of productivity and business opportunities, which are crucial roles to achieve competitiveness. The article aims to propose a reference architecture which will improve the way maintenance is considered in the current manufacturing world, by enabling an overall increase of production rates, while increasing the operational equipment effectiveness and decreasing the impact of maintenance needs. This objective would be accomplished by establishing an IoT infrastructure for the collection of the huge amount of available shop floor data, which can be analyzed, considering data analytics algorithms, predictive maintenance models and forecasting techniques, to perform the machine/system health assessment and prediction of maintenance needs, e.g. by detecting earlier the occurrence of possible failures and consequently the need to implement maintenance interventions. The scheduling of predictive maintenance needs will be integrated with the existing maintenance planning tools, and especially synchronized with the production planning tools to achieve a nondisruptive maintenance impact in the production system. A cloud-based collaborative maintenance services platform allows the secure collection, aggregation and analysis of a large amount of shared data from numerous manufacturers that use the same or similar machinery, and acts as an open market where companies can contract specialized maintenance services. This reference architecture aims to provide replicable architecture to be broadly applicable in a variety of industries, capable to improve the production efficiency through a real-time health monitoring and early detection of failures and outages, to speed up the maintenance delivery, and consequently mitigate their impact.