While Smart contracts are agreements stored on Blockchain, NFTs are representation of digital assets encoded as Smart Contracts. The uniqueness of a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is established through the digital signature of the creator/owner that should be authenticatable and verifiable over a long period of time. This requires possession of assured identities by the entities involved in such transactions, and support for long-term validation, which may pave the way for gaining support from legal systems. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a trusted ecosystem that can assure the identity of an entity, including human users, domain names, devices etc. In PKI, a digital certificate assures the identity by chaining and anchoring to a trusted root, which is currently not the case in Smart Contracts and NFTs. The storage of the digital assets in decentralized nodes need to be assured for availability for a long period of time. This invariably depends on the sustenance of the underlying network that requires monitoring and auditing for assurance. In this paper, we discuss the above challenges in detail and bring out the intricate issues. We also bust the myth that decentralized trust models are flawless and incident free and also indicate that over time, they tend to centralize for optimality. We then present our proposals, and structures that leverages the existing Public Key Infrastructure systems, with mechanisms for creating an environment for reliable Smart Contracts and NFTs.

2022 IEEE International Conference on Public Key Infrastructure and its Applications (PKIA)