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An On-Chain Method for Automatic Entitlement Management Using Blockchain Smart Contracts

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Business Information Systems Workshops (BIS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 373))

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Abstract

Managing the entitlements for the compliant use of digital assets is a complex and labour-intensive task. As a consequence, implemented processes tend to be slow and inconsistent. Automated approaches have been proposed, including systems using distributed ledger technology (blockchains), but to date these require additional off-chain sub-systems to function. In this paper, we present the first approach to entitlement management that is entirely on-chain, i.e. the functionality for matching the digitally encoded rights of content owners (expressed in ODRL) and the request for use by a customer are checked for compliance in a smart contract. We describe the matching algorithm and our experimental implementation for the Ethereum platform.

F. Petroni—This work was carried out while the author was working at Refinitiv Labs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Version 2.2 is the current version, c.f. https://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/.

  2. 2.

    https://dalicc.net (accessed 2019-02-18).

  3. 3.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model (accessed 2019-02-18).

  4. 4.

    https://www.w3.org (accessed 2019-02-18).

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache (accessed 2019-02-18).

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/ethereum/web3.py (accessed 2019-02-18).

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/ethereum/solidity (accessed 2019-02-18).

  8. 8.

    Note that the type is an attribute of the node, therefore the checkAttributes function will consider it.

  9. 9.

    The idea behind this sub-tree containment is similar to the subsumption check conducted as part of the unification algorithm [20]; however, in computational terms, run-time complexity benefits from the flat nature of the Policy DAGS.

  10. 10.

    In particular, using a blockchain avoids the existence of inconsistent states between the producer and consumer of data assets.

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum (accessed 2019-02-18).

  12. 12.

    https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum (accessed 2019-02-18).

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/ewasm/design (accessed 2019-02-18).

  14. 14.

    https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx (accessed 2019-02-18).

  15. 15.

    https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/security (accessed 2019-02-18).

  16. 16.

    https://developer.arm.com/technologies/trustzone (accessed 2019-02-18).

  17. 17.

    https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum (accessed 2019-02-18).

  18. 18.

    https://www.r3.com/corda-platform/ (accessed 2019-02-18).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Refinitiv Labs, Refinitiv, London, UK

    Timothy Nugent, Benedict Whittam Smith & Jochen L. Leidner

  2. Facebook, London, UK

    Fabio Petroni

  3. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Jochen L. Leidner

Authors
  1. Timothy Nugent
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  2. Fabio Petroni
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  3. Benedict Whittam Smith
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  4. Jochen L. Leidner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabio Petroni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poznan, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Rafael Corchuelo

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Nugent, T., Petroni, F., Smith, B.W., Leidner, J.L. (2019). An On-Chain Method for Automatic Entitlement Management Using Blockchain Smart Contracts. In: Abramowicz, W., Corchuelo, R. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 373. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_22

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