Five to six years ago, blockchain technology emerged as a bona fide option for capabilities outside of traditional digital cryptocurrency applications that it was known for, like Bitcoin.
Experts at that time saw an opening for the digital ledger technology to be applied “on a case-by-case basis.” As the underlying capability, the blockchain offers an immutable record of a transaction based on a distributed consensus algorithm. These so-called smart contracts are tamper-proof and executed by each node, or “blockchain,” in a network.
The Congressional Blockchain Caucus even began to identify the economic opportunity that blockchain represented, and the National Institute of Standards of Technology opened up a blockchain lab to run off-the-shelf blockchain systems. And while these early adopters of blockchain had to fight against the notoriety and helped dispel the notion that blockchain was only for cryptocurrency, they also identified early military-related use cases, such as for U.S. Army medical evacuations or unmanned systems.
At the time, blockchain was being labeled as “the most disruptive technology since the Internet,” which almost seems naive given the latest onslaught of large language models and generative artificial intelligence currently transforming the digital world.
The evolution of blockchain-based applications has not stopped, however, and researchers are seeing many more military use cases—such as for secure content sharing and data management. Blockchains are effective for securely sharing information in artificial and virtual reality applications and across military Internet of Things devices, according to a recent report from the American Blockchain Initiative (ABI) called Modern Warfare on the Blockchain: An Unseen Technological Revolution on the Battlefield.
By employing smart contracts, blockchain ensures secure access to data among multiple users, improving the quality of service in inventory management, remote mission handling, and battlefield assistance,” the ABI report stated.
On the battlefield, blockchain can be used in operations, and command and control systems. The end-to-end tracking ability of blockchains also aids supply chain management and logistics, as well as maritime monitoring systems. In addition, wireless sensor networks with blockchain-related technologies can enhance security and management processes, protecting against different types of network attacks and enabling secure data transmission and storage, the ABI report suggested.
Regarding cybersecurity collaboration, “a consortium blockchain architecture can be used to share threat data and coordinate responses to cyberattacks, improving the overall cybersecurity posture of military networks,” the report noted.
For tactical networks, however, applying blockchain technologies is a bit more challenging, given network communication protocols and reliance on transmission control protocol for block transfer and synchronization, the ABI indicated.
The latest findings put blockchain in swarms of unmanned vehicles—and with initial success, say researchers Marco Dorigo, Alexandre Pacheco, Andreagiovanni Reina and Volker Strobel from the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, known as IRIDIA, in Belgium.
Scientists have closely examined how blockchains can purport fundamental properties to the real-world deployment of robots and groups of autonomous systems. This applies to the operation of multiple robots as well as to the defense of autonomous systems against a malfunctioning or malicious robot.
“Blockchain technology can enhance mobile multi-robot systems, and this enhancement includes ensuring that autonomous robotic agents adhere to applicable laws, are identifiable and accountable for their behavior, are capable of identifying and neutralizing malfunctioning robots, and can actively participate in economic transactions for the exchange of goods and services,” the IRIDIA engineers stated.
They published their most recent work, Blockchain Technology for Mobile Multi-robot Systems, in “Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering,” Volume 1, April 2024, 264–274. In 2023, they released the study Robot swarms neutralize harmful Byzantine Robots using a blockchain-based token economy, in Science Robotics, Volume 8, Issue 29.
“The behavior of robots can be recorded in the blockchain, which is a tamper-proof database that allows for online fault detection and offline auditing,” Dorigo, Pacheco, Reina and Strobel said in Nature Reviews. “Smart contracts can assist multi-robot systems by providing supervision, synchronized data storage capabilities and system-wide rules.”
Swarm architects can select the level of blockchain autonomy that they want the robots to perform. This can range from having the robots fully manage the blockchain activities with a high degree of autonomy down to a minimum level, where the robot merely interacts with an external blockchain, for example.
“With the maximum degree of autonomy…. the blockchain is maintained exclusively by the multi-robot system, the scientists said. “Each robot produces, broadcasts and validates the contents of new blocks, and maintains a local copy of the blockchain.”
The researchers also see the possibility of a hybrid set up that allows a multi-robot system to “host and maintain an internal blockchain, often called a sidechain, which synchronizes relevant information with an externally hosted blockchain, or mainchain, when possible.” Such an architecture would serve applications that have intermittent connections to external infrastructure. The scientists have not yet seen a lot of research into this hybrid solution, though.
Early research looking at a high degree of autonomy, with each robot being a blockchain node, shows initial success, Dorigo, Pacheco, Reina and Strobel said in Nature Reviews.
“A smart contract platform enabled a robot swarm to detect inconsistencies in robots’ behaviors—some of the robots were Byzantine [or adversarial]—demonstrating how blockchain technology could add a security layer on top of existing swarm robotics algorithms in a binary decision-making scenario,” they noted. “Importantly, the robot swarms controlled by the smart contracts were also resilient to Sybil attacks—attacks in which a small minority of robots forge many fake identities to try and gain control over the robot swarm.”
This capability could benefit the military, especially in underwater operations, where unmanned vehicles are working below the surface to perform certain activities in a trusted manner.
“It is anticipated that, in the near future, mobile multi-robot systems will be more and more present in our lives to support people and industries in their daily activities,” the researchers explained. “In particular, mobile multi-robot systems might enable the efficient execution of activities—such as environmental monitoring, waste collection, including the cleaning of oceans and underwater exploration. … Mobile multi-robot systems might also provide important support to mitigate black swan events such as nuclear disasters, earthquakes and terrorist attacks.”
The engineers emphasized that more research is needed in the burgeoning application of blockchains to multi-robotic systems. “As of the beginning of 2024, only preliminary proof of concepts for coordinating and securing multi-robot systems via smart contracts have been reported,” they stated in Nature Reviews. “Even though initial results are promising, the usage of blockchain technology in multi-robot systems needs substantial research before it can be successfully deployed.”
In addition, another issue that the military will have to address is blockchain’s heavy reliance on cryptography—such as the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). The threat posed by the coming powerful quantum computers to this standardized encryption makes blockchains vulnerable, according to Robert Campbell an adjunct professor from Capital Technology University, who published his research, Evaluation of Post-Quantum Distributed Ledger Cryptography, in The Journal of British Blockchain Association, Vol. 2, Issue 1, ISSN Print: 2516-3949. The ECDSA cryptography has been “cloned often” from the Bitcoin blockchain, he warned.
“Blockchain and distributed ledger technology technologies use an asymmetric digital signature scheme for private key generation,” Campbell stated. “The ECDSA algorithm is the cryptography the Bitcoin blockchain uses to generate the public and private keys. There is a misconception that blockchain technology “can’t be hacked.” The technology offers excellent cybersecurity promise for many areas, but the limitations and strengths must be defined. The Bitcoin blockchain, [with] the ECDSA … has significant weaknesses, which include general algorithm structure, side channel attacks and threats from quantum computers.”