"Blockchain Technology Could Provide Secure Communications for Robot Teams"

According to a study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Polytechnic University of Madrid published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, using blockchain technology as a communication tool for a team of robots could provide security against deception. A blockchain offers a tamper-resistant record of all transactions, which in this case, are messages issued by robot team leaders, thus enabling follower robots to identify inconsistencies in the trail of information. Tokens are used by the robot leaders to signal movements and add transactions to the blockchain. When the leaders are caught lying, they forfeit their tokens. Therefore, this transaction-based communications system can limit the number of lies a hacked robot could spread. A blockchain, while commonly used as a secure ledger for cryptocurrency, is essentially a list of data structures called blocks, which are connected in a chain. Each block consists of the information it is supposed to store, the hash of the stored information, and the hash of the previous block in the chain. In the study, the information stored in each block is a set of directions issued by a leader robot to follower robots. If a malicious robot tries to change a block's content, the block hash will change, and the altered block will be disconnected from the chain. Eduardo Castelló, the lead author of the paper, hopes to build off this work to develop novel security systems for robots using transaction-based interactions. This article continues to discuss the transaction-based communications system designed to ensure that teams of robots can still achieve their goal even if one or more leader robots are hacked by a malicious agent. 

MIT reports "Blockchain Technology Could Provide Secure Communications for Robot Teams"