Welcome to TESCON project

Project full name: Tools for Enforcement of Smart Contracts
Knowledge Transfer Fellow: Carlos Molina-Jimenez
Principal Investigator: Jon Crowcroft
Host: HAT Community Foundation
Grant: RG 95076
Duration: Feb 2018--Dec 2018

TESCON

TESCON is a collaborative project between the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the HAT Community Foundation.

This page will be used as a blog space to report the development of the project as estipulated in the grant application.

HAT Community Foundation

The HAT Community Foundation is a non-profit company limited by guarantee based in Barton, Cambridge. Is an SME created to promote and implement technology to help individuals trade their personal data.

Aim of the project

The main aim of the project is the industrial evaluation of the tools (after alignment with a leading blockchain platform) for the enforcement of smart contracts.

Results

Contract Compliance Checker upgraded:
The Contract Compliance Checker tool has been upgraded from version 1.1 to version 1.2. The software is available from the conch repository at Git.
Users guide produced:
The Users Guide version 1.2 is available from Git and details the installation procedure.
Preliminary scenario identified:
A preliminary use case scenario to examine potential integration architectures of the Contract Compliance Checker and Ethereum has been identified. It is is inspired on the the DataBuyer portal of HAT Community Foundation and involves an individual selling her personal to an data buyer.
Experimental blockchain platform selcted:
A blockchain platform to be used in the integration has been indentified. I have opted for Ethereum for the following reasons: among the leading blockchain Ethereum is one of the most matures and well documented, more importantly, it supports Turing complete language for writing smart contracts, namely, Solidity
Integration architecture designed:
I have designed an architecture for a potential intehration of the Contract Compliance Checker and Ethereum.
Technical report produced:
The architecture is documented in the technical report On and Off-Blockchain Enforcement Of Smart Contracts. The central idea is to use the Contract Compliance Checker as a component of a hybrid architecture that conducts on-blockchain and off-blockchain contract enforcement.
On-blockchain enforcement is conducted by a smart contract running on Ethereum while off-blockchain enforcement is conducted on a complementary smart contract running on the Contract Compliance Checker.
The Contract Compliance Checher is used to address scalability, response time, consensus latency and other issues that aflict trasactions executed on-blockchain.
I have been in close collaboration with collegues from the School of Computing Science of University of Newcastle. I acknowledge their contribution.