A Generic Blockchain Framework to Secure Decentralized Applications

Blockchain technology is gaining popularity in industries and governments for information monitoring, distribution, and tracking. Thanks to the built-in security properties, blockchain provides security integrity to various decentralized applications (dApps) involving distributed operations including supply chain, healthcare, banking, internet of things (IoT), and networking. In this paper, we propose a generic blockchain framework (GBF) for applying two blockchains to the dApp systems, one to establish trust and the other to use the trust for securing applications. GBF provides a generally applicable framework and addresses the foundational questions of the blockchain objectives, participants, and the underlying distributed consensus protocol in use. We apply GBF to various case studies from the recent blockchain research to show its effectiveness and generality. We also prototype GBF using smart contract and experiment on CloudLab for preliminary evaluations focusing on the application-general metrics. We propose GBF to facilitate blockchain/dApp research and development by providing the initial framework and enable the preliminary analyses so that the decentralized applications with specific aims can build on GBF.