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A Blockchain-Based Application to Protect Minor Artworks

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A Blockchain-Based Application to Protect Minor Artworks A Blockchain-based Application to Protect Minor Artworks Clara Bacciu, Angelica Lo Duca, Andrea Marchetti IIT-CNR - via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa (Italy) [name].[surname]@iit.cnr.it Keywords: blockchain, Ethereum, recordkeeping, IPFS, Cultural Heritage, minor artwork Abstract: A new emerging trend concerns the implementation of services and distributed applications through the blockchain technology. A blockchain is an append-only database, which guarantees security, transparency and immutability of records. Blockchains can be used in the field of Cultural Heritage to protect minor artworks, i.e. artistic relevant works not as famous as masterpieces. Minor artworks are subjected to counterfeiting, thefts and natural disasters because they are not well protected as famous artworks. This paper describes a blockchain-based application, called MApp (Minor Artworks application), which lets authenticated users (pri- vate people or organizations), store the information about their artworks in a secure way. The use of blockchain produces three main advantages. Firstly, artworks cannot be deleted from the register thus preventing thieves to remove records associated stolen objects. Secondly, artworks can be added and updated only by authorized users, thus preventing counterfeiting in objects descriptions. Finally, records can be used to keep artworks memory in case of destruction caused by a natural disaster. 1 INTRODUCTION cessible. To complicate things, in the last decades, Italy (as many other places in the world) has suffered Minor artworks are works that are artistically rel- a series of catastrophic events that largely affected evant but not as well-known as famous masterpieces, cultural heritage: earthquakes, landslides, floods, col- or belonging to the so-called minor arts, such as books lapses in important archaeological sites such as Pom- and manuscripts, pottery, lacquerware, furniture, jew- pei. Such events may have affected not only the ellery, or textiles. Examples of such works could be works themselves, but even their catalogues. Finally, those kept in some small libraries or churches, or even often, although minor artworks are registered in lo- in private households. In general, since it is often not cal databases, they can be easily erased from these well protected, a minor artwork may be more sub- catalogues, thus they can be completely forgotten in ject to counterfeiting, theft, and natural disaster. In case of theft. These motivations stress the need for Italy, trafficking in works of art is the third most lu- new practices to protect cultural heritage. Blockchain crative illegal activity, and globally the trend is the technology can prove to be effective in keeping digital same. Minor artworks having a medium/high value archives of works of art secure and up-to-date, provid- are easy to smuggle and sell for organised crime, since ing an aid for protection against natural and environ- controls on the origin of the good and on subsequent mental disasters, war damages, organised crime. transactions are often limited, even in famous muse- In this paper we would like to demonstrate that ums (Chiodi and Fedeli, 2018). This is true despite the blockchain technology can be used to protect mi- the existence of International treaties on protection of nor artworks and then we present a practical applica- cultural heritage, like the UNIDROIT Convention on tion (MApp) as a proof of the validity of this position. Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (Rome, MApp combines the benefits of the blockchain tech- 1955). As for this treaty, buyers have the obligation nology and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS)2 for to check if the artwork has been stolen or illegally ex- the management of minor artworks archives. MApp ported. Some databases exist that can be used to per- provides users, either private people or organiza- form those checks, like the Interpol database of stolen tions, a public repository for minor artworks storage. artwork1, but are not always up-to-date or easily ac- Thanks to some specific advantages of blockchain, 1 https://www.interpol.int/How-we-work/ Date: 2019-07-29 Databases/Stolen-Works-of-Art-Database Access 2 https://ipfs.io/ Access Date: 2019-07-29 MApp is a secure application, which prevents thieves without rewriting also the new ones. With respect from removing records from the repository, prevents to a standard database, a blockchain is an append- counterfeiters with tampering with objects descrip- only register. This means that information can only tions, and helps users preserving artworks memory be added, but it cannot be removed. Modifications to in case of destruction of the physical object. Com- the stored data can be done by re-uploading a new pared to standard databases, the blockchain register version of it. A distributed consensus algorithm is guarantees integrity, transparency and authenticity of used to decide which transactions are to be consid- records. ered valid. New participants that want to start col- The remainder of the paper is organized as fol- laborating to the maintenance of the repository must lows: in Section 2 we give an overview of the follow this algorithm. There is no need of a central blockchain and IPFS technologies and in Section 3 authority or trust between nodes; the consensus algo- we illustrate the related work. Section 4 describes the rithm and cryptography grant the correctness of data problem setting and Sections 5 and 6 the MApp ap- even in presence of some malicious nodes. Signatures plication and its implementation. Finally, in Section and timestamping guarantee non-repudiation and are 7 we give conclusions and future work. a valid tool to perform audits. Summarizing, the big advantages of a blockchain as repository of data are that it is distributed, with no need of a central author- 2 BACKGROUND ity a no single point of failure, immutable, and secure. The main issues with blockchain implementation of distributed ledgers are scalability and efficiency: of- In this section we give an overview of the tech- ten, consensus algorithms that are used to grant con- nologies exploited by MApp: blockchain and IPFS. sistency are expensive in terms of time and resources. But in some cases trust assumptions can be relaxed, so 2.1 Blockchain that simpler consensus algorithms can be used. The most important blockchain protocols are: the above A blockchain is a particular implementation of a Dis- mentioned Bitcoin, Ethereum (Wood, 2014), Hyper- tributed Ledger (DL) (Zheng et al., 2016). A DL is es- ledger (Cachin, 2016). sentially a database, which is shared among different nodes of a network. In practice, all the nodes of the network share the same copy of the database and any 2.2 IPFS change made on a node is replicated to all the other nodes in few minutes and, in some cases, even in few seconds. The updates to the repository (called trans- IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed filesystem which actions) are cryptographically signed by the node that permits the storage and the search of files, appli- sent them, and are communicated between partici- cations, websites and data. The substantial differ- pants in a peer-to-peer fashion. DLs can be permis- ence between IPFS and the classical HTTP trans- sioned (as opposite of permissionless) if a new record mission protocol, which regulates the current version can be added to the ledger only by some trusted actor of the Web, consists in the transition from a client- (e.g. government, departments and so on), and pri- server architecture to a peer-to-peer architecture. The vate (as opposite of public) if only trusted nodes can client-server architecture is characterized by a loca- read the content of the ledger. The protocol for the tion based addressing, while the peer-to-peer one is first functioning blockchain was introduced in 2008 defined by a content based addressing. This means to support the Bitcoin digital currency (Nakamoto, that IPFS assigns each content an immutable address, 2008), and implements the ledger as a chain of blocks. which does not change even in case of network fail- Each block contains a payload and a header. The pay- ure. Such an immutable address is built by applying load contains a series of transactions, while the header a hash function to every content. All the hash func- contains a timestamp, a cryptographic signature of the tions are stored into a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), payload (usually a hash of the entire content), and a which is used to access contents in the IPFS. link to the previous block of the chain (i. e., the cryp- The use of IPFS produces the following bene- tographic hash of the previous block). This way, the fits: a) availability, which implies that a resource integrity of the information stored in the blockchain (e.g. web site, file and so on) is always available; b) is protected through a security system based on cryp- anti-censorship, which implies that it is difficult for tography, since each block becomes dependent from authorities to censor resources; fast information re- the content of all the previous blocks, making it im- trieval, which gives the possibility to access resources possible to modify the data contained in old blocks even in case of a slow network. 3 LITERATURE REVIEW about records stored into an archive. ARMA Interna- tional4’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Princi- The problem of managing records through a ples (ARMA International, 2017) define a global stan- blockchain has been largely investigated during the dard that identifies the criticalities and a high-level last few years. In her paper, Lemieux proposes a framework of good practices for information gover- classification of blockchain applications (Lemieux, nance. They are a common set of principles that de- 2017), based on which information is stored in the scribe the conditions under which business records blockchain: a) mirror type, b) digital record type, c) and related information should be maintained.
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