Scale By The Bay 2020: Rudolf Bayer, C-chain: the Integration of 5G and real time Blockchain
[Music] okay hello everybody i hope you can hear me all um during the last years i have been investigating blockchain technology and we developed a special version called c chain and this this blockchain version has two outstanding properties it is very lean and it is extremely fast for that reason this technology is ideally suited for integrating 5g technology with blockchain technology because both are reacting extremely fast now today i'm wearing two hats so to speak one hat is the technical university munich and the other one is a new startup called katina okay um here you see my group at the technical university in munich and this is a new startup called katrina which was just recently formed c chain is a very fast and clean blockchain i mentioned that already it's i don't have enough time to go into technical details for that reason simply if you're interested in checking the details simply google c chain there you see several hits and then go to the web page of the technical university munich and there you see several white papers i'm interested in new markets which emerge specifically by the combination of 5g with a very fast blockchain technology one is for example the whole iot market with edge devices and microcontrollers another one is a digital factory where you have pay per use and smart contracts for machine to machine communication if for example you have a robot whose work is supposed to be paid by usage you have a arm of a robot moving around in the in a factory and you have to react very quickly to be able to record that another area is heavy machinery you may remember the viking sky accident about a year ago where machines fell out and this probably has a tremendous succession of judicial of [Music] quarreling which could be avoided if all events would have been recorded in a blockchain here are some design decisions of blockchain versus c chain we replaced proof of work large by proof of correctness that is essentially signatures the single blockchain we replaced by many small transaction chains there is an interesting example in germany for example there are about 50 million cars on the road maintenance chains for cars are interesting um but it doesn't make any sense to record all that in a single in a single chain so we would use 50 million separate chains one for every car there are miners they were replaced by a certified c chain manager and the dynamic consensus replaced by a one-time static certification the consequences of that are rather dramatic we achieve very high performance extremely simple infrastructure the system runs for example on a raspberry pi or a microcontroller it is perfectly scalable very simple infrastructure extremely low cost and the wide range of that cage is which i just tried to indicate it can be used in real-time environments and it is embeddable here is a graphical example this is a edge computer this edge computer collects data one of our use cases is hydro turbine or robotors or cars and the software processes running on such a microcontroller there is a first process that does data collection there is a second process a smart contract which analyzes the data and prepares transactions for example for a events there is the so-called c chain foundation which signs and encrypts on transactions and there is the seek the c chain manager which does the maintenance of the blockchain itself so the bottom line of that architecture is that such a micro device produces a complete blockchain the moment it goes outside the blockchain is already done and then it can be um distributed to data warehouse to a scada system erp system and so on to many different usages of the blockchain itself okay now one of the principles of some of the principles of c chain are every agent and agents are humans smart contracts hardware components every such agent has a unique digital id which we call the crypt id every agent must be certified every transaction must be digitally signed and then every transaction is recorded in c chain a blockchain variant the basic interaction paradigm looks as follows let's say there is an agent you and there is an agent v this agent generates a transaction encrypts a transaction signs the transaction and upload it uploads it to the ctm in this instance the blockchain is generated and that happens within 20 milliseconds with a absolutely final commitment and then the generated blockchain here is synchronized immediately with the sender with a receiver and they can replicate their blockchain as often as they want to so to put it in a nutshell looking at the at the data structure we use precisely a blockchain data structure but we replaced the booking process by a much more efficient system now i come to some specific examples this is a demonstrator for an ultrasound distance sensor very simple but interesting is we measure at 100 hertz the distance and we easily book that rate of transactions in a raspberry pi this is a raspberry pi and this is a on a ultrasound sensor this is an example for the video of this ultrasound distance sensor this part partial window is the shows the data recording this window shows the transactions which are sent off this window shows the transactions as they are booked in the chain and up here you see a visualization of the actual distance and here you see change the distance radically on okay now i said that we are working with the edge nodes here is a particular example with nxp chips down here this is the onboard computer which is basically your linux system or the size you see on this one cent piece and but we combine that for extremely for particularly high performance with a cryptographic processor code processor on this in this picture you see this small red circle oh that is a cryptographic processor which of course boosts performance um very much i see i seem to have lots of time so i can talk a little bit slower [Music] this is the overall architecture of the c chain system on a microcontroller there is a server or various servers the booking process called ccm for c chain manager is running on this server on a client up here there is first of all the c chain foundation now that's a rather important point because the c chain foundation is a library which is imported into every application and this sea chain foundation does the bulk of the work it does everything related to encryption public and private key generation aes encryption signature designing transactions uh checking the validity of other transactions and so on or okay if the complete system i will show several potential architectures in a minute if the complete system runs on a um on an edge controller um both pieces are running on the same machine and therefore the edge controller produces a complete blockchain now i said you're integrating um this technology on edge nodes and in combination with 5g here is you know two examples of a potential architecture the yellow part up here that is um [Music] let's say an edge node and the processes on that this is comparable to a light node in blockchain terminology the processes on that are a opc ua server which collects the data from some external sensors there is the opcua client which analyzes the data and decides what are interesting events which must must be booked as transactions the ch ccf the c chain foundation this completes the transaction and sends it off to a ccm which is one or several separate now because of the iot world we are just moving everything to the go language and this boosts performance dramatically because in this world in the go in go processes you can communicate via go channels which are extremely fast and extremely convenient to program this is one potential architecture so if for example you have several microcontrollers attached to robots in a digital factory you would probably have within the factory one ccm or a few ccms running now if you are in an environment where you want to produce a complete blockchain on the micro device you would also include the ccm on the same device this would be very interesting for example if you're talking about autonomous driving in autonomous driving you need to record data and events in such a way that the resulting blockchain should be generated on the car and should not go to some ccm which then there could be problems in between theoretically um okay now i said we are integrating 5g and c chain the reason is that both are comparably fast and are a perfect match and to illustrate that i would like to show you a specific example namely a use case of vehicle to vehicle communication wire 5g with legally binding and immutable booking in blockchain now if you talk about autonomous driving i am sure you need a technology like a blockchain in the car because you have to make absolutely sure that these data cannot be tampered with you also have to make sure that whoever sends a transaction must be authenticated otherwise somebody could for example stop a complete autobahn by hacking the system and injecting false warnings okay now let's look at the specific alerts which i'm talking about if for example you hit freezing eyes on the road or if you have aqua planing or if you have an accident and you want to send out a warning to other cars you don't have much time i'm talking about german autobahns um where you would like to inform vehicles let's say in the surrounding of one kilometers and what we can do is we can't trigger um automatic braking within other cars within 100 milliseconds i'll go to the numbers in a second now whether that is legal or not that's not my concern at the moment um there will definitely be rules what is acceptable what is not acceptable and so on but the technology we have allows to break another car in case of emergency in a time below 100 milliseconds and here are the numbers and talking about german autobahns where people drive around with 180 kilometers per hour that's easy to compute in such a case you need 20 seconds for one kilometer or two seconds for 100 meters now c chain in combination with 5g well here we need 5g because of communication between different cars before i talked about the possibility to have everything running on a single micro device but here we need communication between cars and the latency for 5g is 5 milliseconds this is measured time theoretically people claim that it latency can go down to 1 millisecond in 5g it takes definitely less than 30 milliseconds to do the booking within a c chain server which is for example sitting in a broadcasting station it takes another five milliseconds to reach the second car and i have assumed graciously that it takes ten milliseconds to activate the brake automatically wire the can bus and if you sum all that up you're ending up with 50 milliseconds now i added a safety margin of 1 or 50 and that's why i arrived at 120 seconds okay um now we don't really have 5g available yet but we can test with the wi-fi or wireless lawn in combination with the c chain and there the numbers change a little bit with wi-fi we have 20 milliseconds latency and if you add it all up you still are below 100 milliseconds so so the the bottom line is why do you need a blockchain for that such events for both driver assistance or between autonomous vehicles must be recorded in such a way that these events are legally binding and they are definitely immutable and they must be archived within the blockchain so you can check later on what really happened what were the essential events in that okay i have two more a few more minutes so i go on to the next slide this is a particular architecture of an of an nxp system and this here is the computer and here you see the security integrated chip that's the cryptographic code processor there are various co-processors on the market right now some of them work with rsa in the iot market and micro devices people prefer ecc because of the much lower footprint and higher speed and so on so that is a particular infrastructure with which we have been working but that is presently not in production that is a a demonstrator system okay um [Music] i guess that was it from my side you