A Usage-Based Mechanism for Securing Systems Via Blockchains

The costs of operating a secure system are not always shared proportionately to the benefits that participants receive, which often hinders the adoption of security solutions. Blockchains provide us with an economic framework to distribute costs through cryptographic contracts, however, existing work in building secure applications using blockchains does not take advantage of this framework to align costs and benefits for system participants. One such application is the security of the domain name system. Past attempts to secure the DNS using blockchains suffer from a common problem: the costs of security are not shared proportionately to the benefits that participants receive, because benefits are tied to reading the secured content, while costs are tied to writing it into the blockchain. In this paper, we outline a new blockchain model for supporting secure systems in which users pay for the system at a rate proportionate to the benefits they receive. This is achieved by charging participants based on the frequency with which their content is securely retrieved and used by others, rather than the frequency with which they post or update content. The resulting model provides a flexible way to control the compensation and transaction rates of miners, and has applications to security in numerous problem domains.