Outsourcing Service Fair Payment Based on Blockchain and Its Applications in Cloud Computing

As a milestone in the development of outsourcing services, cloud computing enables an increasing number of individuals and enterprises to enjoy the most advanced services from outsourcing service providers. Because online payment and data security issues are involved in outsourcing services, the mutual distrust between users and service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing solutions only consider a specific type of services and rely on a trusted third-party to realize fair payment. In this paper, to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third-party, trusted or not, we introduce BPay, an outsourcing service fair payment framework based on blockchain in cloud computing. We first propose the system architecture, adversary model and design goals of BPay, then describe the design details. Our security and compatibility analysis indicates that BPay achieves soundness and robust fairness and it is compatible with the Bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain. The key to the robust fairness and compatibility lies in an all-or-nothing checking-proof protocol and a top-down checking method. In addition, our experimental results show that BPay is computationally efficient. Finally, we present the applications of BPay in outsourcing services.