🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses reliability and security challenges of smart contract execution architectures in complex, interconnected systems. We comparatively analyze two dominant paradigms—Order-Execute (OE) and Execute-Order-Validate (EOV)—and propose a rigorous reliability assessment framework integrating formal modeling of safety properties with fault injection. Leveraging a realistic IoT-based energy system, we construct a simulation environment and empirically evaluate the frameworks against representative smart contract vulnerabilities. Results demonstrate that EOV—by relocating validation to occur after execution but before ordering—significantly enhances robustness against reentrancy, time-dependent, and state-inconsistency attacks, achieving superior system-level reliability and security compared to OE. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically quantify the security boundaries of these paradigms within the energy IoT domain, providing both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for designing high-assurance smart contract execution architectures.
📝 Abstract
The industrial market continuously needs reliable solutions to secure autonomous systems. Especially as these systems become more complex and interconnected, reliable security solutions are becoming increasingly important. One promising solution to tackle this challenge is using smart contracts designed to meet contractual conditions, avoid malicious errors, secure exchanges, and minimize the need for reliable intermediaries. However, smart contracts are immutable. Moreover, there are different smart contract execution architectures (namely Order-Execute and Execute-Order-Validate) that have different throughputs. In this study, we developed an evaluation model for assessing the security of reliable smart contract execution. We then developed a realistic smart contract enabled IoT energy case study. Finally, we simulate the developed case study to evaluate several smart contract security vulnerabilities reported in the literature. Our results show that the Execute-Order-Validate architecture is more promising regarding reliability and security.