Posts Tagged ‘oracles’

Cryptographically attestable anti-tampering sensors

To be able to securely report a reading (from any kind of sensors), the combination of the following is necessary:

• a cryptographic attestation of the sensor reading, authenticating the origin of the measure: each device has a private key signing outgoing payloads (with a nonce to avoid replays)
• an anti-tampering installation of the reader device, rendering it inoperable (by wiping the private key) in case of manipulation attempt (connect to another object, inject false stimuli, etc.)

These secure reading devices are called Hardware Oracles, and are the gateways from the physical work to the Blockchain realm.

Source: Hardware Oracles: bridging the Real World to the Blockchain

Blockchains cannot access data outside their network on their own. An oracle – also known as data feed – is a third party service designed for use in smart contracts on the blockchain. They provide external data when needed and push it onto the blockchain.

Such conditions could be any data like weather temperature, successful payment, price fluctuations, etc. Smart contracts contain value and only unlock that value, if certain pre-defined conditions are met. When a particular value is reached, the smart contract changes its state and executes the programmatically predefined algorithms, automatically triggering an event on the blockchain. The primary task of oracles is to provide these values to the smart contract in a secure and trusted manner.

An oracle, in the context of blockchains and smart contracts, is an agent that finds and verifies real world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used by smart contracts.

There are four different types of oracles based on the type of use. We differentiate between software oracles, hardware oracles, consensus oracles and inbound and outbound oracles.

Source: Blockchain Oracles – BlockchainHub

Why do we need Oracles?

Smart contracts confined to on-chain data are like sports cars on local roads. They’re purring with latent power, but can’t do anything really interesting.

To unleash their potential, smart contracts need access to the wide open vistas of data available off-chain, i.e., in the real world. A financial smart contract needs access to equity, commodity, currency, or derivative prices. An insurance smart contact must be aware of triggering events such as bad weather, flight delays, etc. A smart contract allowing consumers to sell online games to one another must confirm that a seller successfully transferred game ownership to a buyer.Latent power waiting to be unchained…

Today, though, smart contracts can’t obtain such data in a highly trustworthy way. And they can’t achieve data privacy. These deficiencies are starving smart contract ecosystems of the data they need to achieve their full promise.

Source: Announcing The Town Crier Service