Editorial: Blockchain for trusted information systems

Abstract

Organizations are often required to collaborate to achieve their goals (Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988). For example, in the logistics domain, several organizations must coordinate their internal tasks to successfully deliver goods to their customers (Perboli et al., 2018). In the medical domain, various actors, such as healthcare providers, pharmacies, and insurance companies, need to collaborate to provide their services (Haleem et al., 2021). In such settings, organizations are required to exchange information in a trusted way. As some participants may be competitors, organizations must ensure to provide other partners with all and only the information required for the tasks that they are in charge of, while at the same time avoiding the leaking of confidential information. Similarly, mechanisms to ensure the provenance of the information provided, and to verify the identity of the participants, should be put in place. Blockchain systems are a promising technology to address trust issues in information systems (Xu et al., 2019). Thanks to their distributed and decentralized nature, and their ability to reach consensus among untrusted parties, blockchains proved to be successful in supporting the exchange of digital (e.g., cryptocurrency) and possibly physical assets in a trusted way. As far as data storage is concerned, it is almost impossible for a single party or a restricted group thereof to alter or delete the information stored in a blockchain. In addition, second-generation blockchains have introduced the so-called smart contracts (Buterin, 2014), arbitrary agreements embodied by immutable code executed among multiple participants with possibly conflicting interests. Despite these features, exploiting blockchains to build trusted information systems remains far from trivial (Köpke et al., 2023). Although the mechanisms handling the execution of smart contracts, as well as handling the data that originate from the blockchain itself, can be considered secure, the same cannot be said for the smart contracts and for the data that they receive as input. First, smart contracts may contain code vulnerabilities, which may cause unexpected behaviors and be exploited by malicious agents. For example, in 2016 a vulnerability in a smart contract allowed 3.6 million ETH to be stolen, causing the so-called DAO accident, which forced a hard fork in the Ethereum blockchain (Mehar et al., 2019). Another major issue is represented by the data originating from outside of the blockchain. Such data is not subject to the tight consistency constraints implemented within blockchains (Comuzzi et al., 2020). Consequently, with these data the blockchain alone does not provide an out-ofthe-box solution to ensure traceability, persistence, and access control. OPEN ACCESS