How to Assess the Dependability of Applications on Top of the Blockchain: Novel Research Challenges

Abstract

It is nowadays extremely popular to devise applications of top of the blockchain technology, due to the flourishing of several open-source platforms and the progressive success of this technology outside its traditional cryptocurrency domain. Testing these applications is particularly challenging and traditionally limited to the performance and functionality verification. How-ever, the progressive adoption of such a technology in critical domains is calling for dependability guarantees. This paper highlights the challenges related to the dependability assessment of these applications, and sketches a possible research direction.