Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2024

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones has led to the growth of mobile app markets, creating a need for enhanced transparency, global access, and secure downloading. This paper introduces AGChain, a blockchain-based gateway that enables trustworthy app delegation within existing markets. AGChain ensures that markets can continue providing services while users benefit from permanent, distributed, and secure app delegation. During its development, we address two key challenges: significantly reducing smart contract gas costs and enabling fully distributed IPFS-based file storage. Additionally, we tackle three system issues related to security and sustainability. We have implemented a prototype of AGChain on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, achieving effective security and decentralization with a minimal gas cost of around 0.0028 USD per app upload (no cost for app download). AGChain also exhibits reasonable performance with an average overhead of 12%.

Keywords

Blockchain, Smart contract, Ethereum, IPFS, App security

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice

First Page

1

Last Page

23

Identifier

10.1145/3709157

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3709157

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