A Permissioned Blockchain Based Feature Management System for Assembly Devices

With the increasing spread and adoption of electronics and software as integral parts of all kinds of physical devices, such devices are becoming controlled by their embedded software. Correspondingly, the manufacturing business has started the transition from selling hardware to selling features (e.g. “insane mode” and “ludicrous mode” in Tesla Model S). Consequently, a trustworthy system to automate such a process becomes essential. This article introduces a permissioned blockchain-based feature management system for assembly devices. Firstly, it leverages software licensing technology to control assembly devices’ features. Secondly, by recording the license ownership transaction data in a permissioned blockchain, the approach (1) takes advantage of blockchain’s trust mechanism and its distributed nature to improve the trustworthiness of the feature management system, and (2) adopts the permissioned blockchain technology to ensure that the license transactions are only visible and applicable to authenticated actors. We further describe an implementation, a proof-of-concept evaluation focusing on functionality and performance, as well as a security analysis.