Empowering citizens by a blockchain-Based Robinson list

Abstract

Robinson lists are adopted in many countries to protect phone subscribers against commercial spam calls. In its essence, they collect the denial of the subscribers to be contacted by marketing operators. Nowadays, all Robinson lists run as centralised services. Namely, citizens have to rely on trusted third parties for the management of their own choices. The Blockchain allows us to envision the development of a decentralised Robinson list in which citizens are finally empowered to autonomously manage their choices. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept (PoC) of a decentralised Robinson list developed with the Algorand technology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to implement a Robinson list on a blockchain technology. The PoC has been designed to support the requirements provided by Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, the manager of the Italian Robinson list. The evaluation of the PoC shows that our decentralised solution provides satisfactory performance, in terms of scalability, latency and costs, when compared to the current centralised service.

Keywords:

• Citizen empowerment
• decentralised public services
• Algorand
• Blockchain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Future of Blockchain 2 competition https://medium.com/future-of-blockchain-competition/future-of-blockchain-2-summary-and-prizes-e87f3c6f392f

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico [Grant Number CUP: D84E19000520008] Regione Lazio [Grant Number CUP: F85F21001550009].

Notes on contributors

Albenzio Cirillo

Albenzio Cirillo is Researcher at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB), a higher education and esearch institution, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. He gained his PhD in Information and Communication Engineering in 2010 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” with a thesis on sound source localisation in reverberant environments. In 2009 he was a Visiting PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, cooperating with the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory and with the DSP Laboratory. Since 2010 he has been working at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni as ICT expert, providing scientific contribution or coordinating activities for several national and european projects focusing on the digital transformation of the Public Administrations. He is author of several conference papers and his current interests are related to innovative communication technologies, including 5G and blockchain.

Vito Dalena

Vito Dalena is Researcher at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB), a higher education and research institution, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Since 2018 he has been working at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni as developer and ICT expert. He gained the master's degree in ICT engineering in 2018, with main focus towards informative systems and knowledge-based systems. His current interests include web technologies and UX design.

Antonio Mauro

Antonio Mauro is Researcher at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB), a higher education and research institution, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Since 2018 he has been working at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni as developer and ICT expert. He gained the master's degree in engineering in computer science in 2018, with main focus on Distributed Systems, Blockchain and he is interested in web technologies.

Francesco Mogavero

Francesco Mogavero is a PhD student in data science at the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of “La Sapienza” University of Rome. Since 2020, he is also collaborating with Fondazione Ugo Bordoni. He received his MS in computer science from the University of Salerno in 2020. His research is focused on the field of cryptography, blockchain, and smart contracts.

Diego Pennino

Diego Pennino is a Researcher in computer science at the Engineering Department of Roma Tre University. He received his PhD in computer science from the same University in 2021. His research is involved in the field of integrity and security of the data, and in the field of blockchain and smartcontracts. He participated and won a contest in the “Scientific School on Blockchain & distributed ledger technology” of Pula in June 2018.

Maurizio Pizzonia

Maurizio Pizzonia is Assistant Professor at Roma Tre University, Italy. His research interests lie in design of algorithms and software systems for cybersecurity, blockchain, internet analysis, and information visualisation. He published more than 50 papers in scientific conferences and journals, and served as coordinator for research units and work packages in two European projects. Dr. Pizzonia is very much oriented in solving real problems and in devising innovative solutions that can lead to applications. In 2011, he co-founded a start up in cloud security. He teaches cybersecurity courses since 2004.

Andrea Vitaletti

Andrea Vitaletti is Associate Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. His research interests include algorithms and protocols for wireless networks and IoT, private and distributed data management and Distributed Ledger Technologies. He co-authored more than 60 papers in scientific conferences and journals. He has been involved in a number of EU projects as researcher, principal investigator and he has coordinated the FET Open PLEASED. He founded the spin-offs WLAB – sold in 2016 – and WSENSE – left in 2019; currently he is the co-founder of GIUSTA. He teaches networking, data-management and IoT topics at engineering and product design MsC and BsC at Sapienza.

Marco Zecchini

Marco Zecchini is a PhD student in data science at the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of “La Sapienza” University of Rome. He received his MS in engineering in computer science from the same University in 2019. His research is involved in the field of internet of things, blockchain and smart contracts.