Combining Smart Construction Objects–Enabled Blockchain Oracles and Signature Techniques to Ensure Information Authentication and Integrity in Construction

Abstract

Reliable and accurate information is crucial for decision making in construction projects. However, stakeholders driven by profit have the potential to manipulate information, compromising information authentication and integrity (IAI). Even worse, digitization in the construction industry has made IAI extremely volatile, e.g., by easily copying, modifying, and falsifying. This study aims to ensure IAI by proposing a four-layer blockchain-based framework for combining smart construction objects (SCOs)–enabled oracles and hash-based digital signature techniques to protect both on-chain and off-chain information. Four deployed smart contracts provide three assurance mechanisms, i.e., signature verification, public data validation, and SCO cross-validation, which have been tested to improve the tampering detection accuracy by 19%, 11%, and 27%, respectively. The contribution of this study is to illustrate how a reliable and flexible blockchain oracle system can be established with limited resources to handle the concomitant IAI problem and provide an in-depth understanding of the IAI assurance mechanisms from the proposed framework. Future research can be conducted to reduce the signature size, enhance scalability, and further increase detection accuracy.