A Blockchain-Based Trust Framework for Service-Oriented Architecture

In the traditional Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web service providers register their service descriptions in the registry for service clients to perform service discovery and invocation. Although this architecture provides loose service invocation, it lacks a dispute resolution mechanism to guarantee the trusted service invocation between untrustworthy service providers and clients. Blockchain technology has unparalleled advantages in decentralization and tamper-resistance, and can be employed in the SOA to solve the untrustworthiness of service invocation. Combining the SOA architecture and blockchain technology, this paper proposes a blockchain-based trust framework for SOA, where the blockchain is used as an evidence recorder and a service registration proxy. To ensure the service traceability, each service invocation is signed by both the service provider and client involved as a trusted credential on the blockchain. The trusted credentials on the blockchain will be retrieved for verification when a service dispute occurs. Moreover, the input parameters and results of a service are encrypted during constructing trusted credentials to ensure the privacy of service data. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can correctly handle the service disputes between service providers and clients in the case of all independent malicious behaviors and most of the combined malicious behaviors, compared with traditional methods. It also could realize the automatic conversion from Web services to trusted services, and complete the trusted service invocation within 2.5s.