DoE Phase 1 Final Technical Report for MokaBlox
- Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States); Moka Blox, LLC.
- Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States); Univ. of Nevada, Reno, NV (United States)
MokaBlox is a university spinoff company building the next generation energy-conscious blockchain technology specifically designed for HPC environments to ensure a decentralized and democratic model for a provable and accountable cyber security and privacy. Blockchain infrastructure can be and is starting to be a provable and accountable model of cybersecurity that is valuable especially in terms of chronically under-appreciated resiliency, performance, and energy efficiency. This project aimed to develop an energy-conscious blockchain technology targeted for HPC cybersecurity. We have reimagined HPC cybersecurity and privacy model as built upon a decentralized and democractic computation model of blockchain that is not only performant but also energy efficient with arrays of new techniques. In the course of this Phase 1 feasibility research and development, we worked: +to reduce the cost of tamper-proof construction in blockchain throughout speculative execution model, referred as Proof-of-Execution (PoE); +to exploit HPC many-core architecture to support creating resilient parallel proof constructions execution model resulting in orders of magnitude speedup and energy reduction, referred to as Resilient Concurrent Consensus (RCC); +to exploit HPC fast interconnect communication, i.e., RDMA, to linearize the communication of blockchain proof construction by allowing direct access to shared memory of remote nodes to identify and counter an array of attacks such as memory equivocation and nodes collusions. [proprietary technology]; +to build from ground-up a new blockchain prototype, named ResilientDB, formerly codenamed as HPChain, with an energy-efficient highly-parallel runtime with deep pipelining and supporting low-level RDMA primitives for fast communication; +to extend our design to Blockchain-as-a-Service for HPC over MPI, the subproject is named BAASH, with various design choices of optimizing energy efficiency such as topology-aware job scheduling and double-layer block validations protocols for I/O reduction enabling efficient inter-site data migration for sharing data for scientific applications centered around data security expressed tamper-proof cross-blockchain primitive; +to enable scientific data reproducibility for scientific computational modeling and results through tamper-proof data provenance, which tracks the entire lifespan of the data during the experiments and simulation at various phases such as data creation, data changes, and data archival; +to clarify relationship of this work to extant NIST and DoD cybersecurity frameworks, namely for DoD’s CMMC [11,12] and NIST’s SP 800-171 [14] specifications, as these have not yet been clarified for cybersecurity applications of blockchains in general, by DFARS [13], or for specialized blockchain platforms as are used here.
- Research Organization:
- Moka Blox
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Engineering & Technology. Office of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs
- Contributing Organization:
- Pronghorn HPC Facility, UNR; Nevada Center for Applied Research, UNR
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0020455
- OSTI ID:
- 1727375
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-MOKA-20455
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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