Fenrir: Blockchain-Based Inter-Company App-Store for the Automotive Industry

Abstract

From a software evolution perspective, more actors are integrating the in-vehicle software development cycle. In this process, software deployment mechanisms must include more complex techniques to meet the software verification and traceability levels required by industry safety and security constraints. In this context, we propose Fenrir, a public inter-automaker blockchain-based application store framework in which each automaker retains software installability control. This application store also aims to ensure traceability and security, while also keeping the solution light in terms of both energy consumption and computing requirements, to be used in constrained environments.We implemented Fenrir in a heterogeneous architecture composed by both on-board (bearing an ARM Cortex-A53 chipset, already deployed in cars) and off-board (Amazon EC2) nodes for a realistic automotive use-case scenario, in which we evaluated the performance and energy consumption. We demonstrate that the overheads added by our solution for an entire software deployment pipeline—comprising both deployment and usage of already deployed software packages—depends mainly on the verification mechanism, whose impact is not significant, i.e., 3.8% for the worst-case scenario and 0.3% for a typical scenario.

Keywords

• Automotive
• application store
• blockchain
• distributed systems
• multi-provider
• software dependency management