Last Will Letter: A Secure Federated P2P Scheme for Blockchain-Oriented Virtual Redundancy and Backup

The work introduced here, as a continuation of the research for blockchain-based Virtual Redundancy suggests a novel approach to improve the reliability of any distributed system but oriented towards the needs of the power grid. The original solution proposes the creation of Redundancy through Virtualization through the use of Blockchain technology by exploiting the fault-tolerant nature of this technology to use it as a distributed platform that ensures the creation of the service and security to some extent. Unfortunately, the local application layer and API were no longer suitable for future projects. While maintaining the proposed architecture and the optimal machine allocation algorithm, this work comes up with the main goal of developing a suitable P2P alternative to replacing the application layer and API, taking into consideration the need for improved security in the algorithm allocation process, with three different threats in mind: information leak, malicious files propagation (e.g. malware), and man-in-the-middle. In order to tackle the aforementioned problems, a scheme involving three different types of nodes (Testator, Inheritor, and Executor), named Last Will Letter was proposed, inspired by the fictional ritual for power transition within a secret society to name a new successor upon the decease of its grandmaster. The whole scheme proposed was deployed and tested in a 5-node network with some degrees of stress by single machine failures, the system provided satisfactory results, without harming the general application performance. Finally, the execution times and computation requirements to achieve Virtual Redundancy with a secure migration scheme are reported.