A Blockchain-based Application to Protect Minor Artworks

Clara Bacciu, Angelica Lo Duca and Andrea Marchetti

IIT-CNR - Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy

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

Minor artworks are works that are artistically rele-

vant but not as well-known as famous masterpieces,

or belonging to the so-called minor arts, such as books

and manuscripts, pottery, lacquerware, furniture, jew-

ellery, or textiles. Examples of such works could be

those kept in some small libraries or churches, or even

in private households. In general, since it is often not

well protected, a minor artwork may be more sub-

ject to counterfeiting, theft, and natural disaster. In

Italy, trafﬁcking in works of art is the third most lu-

crative illegal activity, and globally the trend is the

same. Minor artworks having a medium/high value

are easy to smuggle and sell for organised crime, since

controls on the origin of the good and on subsequent

transactions are often limited, even in famous muse-

ums (Chiodi and Fedeli, 2018). This is true despite

the existence of International treaties on protection of

cultural heritage, like the UNIDROIT Convention on

Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (Rome,

1955). As for this treaty, buyers have the obligation

to check if the artwork has been stolen or illegally ex-

ported. Some databases exist that can be used to per-

form those checks, like the Interpol database of stolen

artwork

, but are not always up-to-date or easily ac-

https://www.interpol.int/How-we-work/Databases/

Stolen-Works-of-Art-Database Access Date: 2019-07-29

cessible. To complicate things, in the last decades,

Italy (as many other places in the world) has suffered

a series of catastrophic events that largely affected

cultural heritage: earthquakes, landslides, ﬂoods, col-

lapses in important archaeological sites such as Pom-

pei. Such events may have affected not only the

works themselves, but even their catalogues. Finally,

often, although minor artworks are registered in lo-

cal databases, they can be easily erased from these

catalogues, thus they can be completely forgotten in

case of theft. These motivations stress the need for

new practices to protect cultural heritage. Blockchain

technology can prove to be effective in keeping digital

archives of works of art secure and up-to-date, provid-

ing an aid for protection against natural and environ-

mental disasters, war damages, organised crime.

In this paper we would like to demonstrate that

the blockchain technology can be used to protect mi-

nor artworks and then we present a practical applica-

tion (MApp) as a proof of the validity of this position.

MApp combines the beneﬁts of the blockchain tech-

nology and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS)

for

the management of minor artworks archives. MApp

provides users, either private people or organiza-

tions, a public repository for minor artworks storage.

Thanks to some speciﬁc advantages of blockchain,

MApp is a secure application, which prevents thieves

https://ipfs.io/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

Bacciu, C., Lo Duca, A. and Marchetti, A.

A Blockchain-based Application to Protect Minor Artworks.

DOI: 10.5220/0008347903190325

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2019), pages 319-325

ISBN: 978-989-758-386-5

319

from removing records from the repository, prevents

counterfeiters with tampering with objects descrip-

tions, and helps users preserving artworks memory

in case of destruction of the physical object. Com-

pared to standard databases, the blockchain register

guarantees integrity, transparency and authenticity of

records.

The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-

lows: in Section 2 we give an overview of the

blockchain and IPFS technologies and in Section 3

we illustrate the related work. Section 4 describes the

problem setting and Sections 5 and 6 the MApp ap-

plication and its implementation. Finally, in Section

7 we give conclusions and future work.

2 BACKGROUND

In this section we give an overview of the technolo-

gies exploited by MApp: blockchain and IPFS.

2.1 Blockchain

A blockchain is a particular implementation of a Dis-

tributed Ledger (DL) (Zheng et al., 2016). A DL is es-

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

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-

actions) are cryptographically signed by the node that

sent them, and are communicated between partici-

pants in a peer-to-peer fashion. DLs can be permis-

sioned (as opposite of permissionless) if a new record

can be added to the ledger only by some trusted actor

(e.g. government, departments and so on), and pri-

vate (as opposite of public) if only trusted nodes can

read the content of the ledger. The protocol for the

ﬁrst functioning blockchain was introduced in 2008

to support the Bitcoin digital currency (Nakamoto,

2008), and implements the ledger as a chain of blocks.

Each block contains a payload and a header. The pay-

load contains a series of transactions, while the header

contains a timestamp, a cryptographic signature of the

payload (usually a hash of the entire content), and a

link to the previous block of the chain (i. e., the cryp-

tographic hash of the previous block). This way, the

integrity of the information stored in the blockchain

is protected through a security system based on cryp-

tography, since each block becomes dependent from

the content of all the previous blocks, making it im-

possible to modify the data contained in old blocks

without rewriting also the new ones. With respect

to a standard database, a blockchain is an append-

only register. This means that information can only

be added, but it cannot be removed. Modiﬁcations to

the stored data can be done by re-uploading a new

version of it. A distributed consensus algorithm is

used to decide which transactions are to be consid-

ered valid. New participants that want to start col-

laborating to the maintenance of the repository must

follow this algorithm. There is no need of a central

authority or trust between nodes; the consensus algo-

rithm and cryptography grant the correctness of data

even in presence of some malicious nodes. Signatures

and timestamping guarantee non-repudiation and are

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-

ity a no single point of failure, immutable, and secure.

The main issues with blockchain implementation of

distributed ledgers are scalability and efﬁciency: of-

ten, consensus algorithms that are used to grant con-

sistency are expensive in terms of time and resources.

But in some cases trust assumptions can be relaxed, so

that simpler consensus algorithms can be used. The

most important blockchain protocols are: the above

mentioned Bitcoin, Ethereum (Wood, 2014), Hyper-

ledger (Cachin, 2016).

2.2 IPFS

IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed ﬁlesystem which

permits the storage and the search of ﬁles, appli-

cations, websites and data. The substantial differ-

ence between IPFS and the classical HTTP trans-

mission protocol, which regulates the current version

of the Web, consists in the transition from a client-

server architecture to a peer-to-peer architecture. The

client-server architecture is characterized by a loca-

tion based addressing, while the peer-to-peer one is

deﬁned by a content based addressing. This means

that IPFS assigns each content an immutable address,

which does not change even in case of network fail-

ure. Such an immutable address is built by applying

a hash function to every content. All the hash func-

tions are stored into a Distributed Hash Table (DHT),

which is used to access contents in the IPFS.

The use of IPFS produces the following bene-

ﬁts: a) availability, which implies that a resource

(e.g. web site, ﬁle and so on) is always available; b)

anti-censorship, which implies that it is difﬁcult for

authorities to censor resources; fast information re-

trieval, which gives the possibility to access resources

even in case of a slow network.

WEBIST 2019 - 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

320

3 LITERATURE REVIEW

The problem of managing records through a

blockchain has been largely investigated during the

last few years. In her paper, Lemieux proposes a

classiﬁcation of blockchain applications (Lemieux,

2017), based on which information is stored in the

blockchain: a) mirror type, b) digital record type, c)

tokenized type.

In the mirror type, the blockchain serves as a mir-

ror, which stores only records ﬁngerprints. The com-

plete information of a record is stored into an external

repository and the blockchain is used only to verify

records integrity. In (Garc

ıa-Barriocanal et al., 2017)

the authors describe a ﬁrst implementation of a decen-

tralized metadata database, based on the combination

of the blockchain and IPFS technologies. In their pa-

per Liang et. al. describe ProvChain (Liang et al.,

2017), a system which guarantees data provenance in

cloud environments. Vishwa et. al. (Vishwa and Hus-

sain, 2018) illustrate a blockchain-based framework,

which guarantees copyright compliance of multime-

dia objects by means of smart contracts.

In the digital record type, the blockchain is used

to store all the records in the form of smart con-

tracts. In (Bhowmik and Feng, 2017) the authors

illustrate a distributed and tamper-proof framework

for media. Each media is represented by a water-

mark, which is ﬁrstly compressed and then stored into

a blockchain. Approved modiﬁcations to media are

stored in the blockchain thus preventing tampering.

In (Galiev et al., 2018) the authors describe Archain, a

blockchain-based archive system, which stores small-

sized records. Multiple roles are deﬁned in the sys-

tem, thus allowing records creation, approval and re-

moval.

In the tokenized type, records are stored in the

blockchain and they are linked to a cryptocurrency.

Adding, updating or removing a record has a cost.

This constitutes an innovative case, where the liter-

ature is not consolidated yet. An example of this

type of blockchain is represented by the Ubitquity

Project

, which records land transactions on behalf of

companies and government agencies.

4 PROBLEM SETTING

The problem of storing minor artworks’ data into

an archive can be considered as a particular case

of recordkeeping, which consists in creating, man-

aging, preserving, and deﬁning access conditions

http://www.ubitquity.io/brazil ubitquity llc pilot.html Ac-

cess Date: 2019-07-29

about records stored into an archive. ARMA Interna-

tional

’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Princi-

ples (ARMA International, 2017) deﬁne a global stan-

dard that identiﬁes the criticalities and a high-level

framework of good practices for information gover-

nance. They are a common set of principles that de-

scribe the conditions under which business records

and related information should be maintained. They

are: Accountability: there should be a person that

is responsible and accountable for all the process;

Transparency: all the information should be docu-

mented in an open and veriﬁable manner; Integrity:

the information assets should be as authentic and reli-

able as possible; Protection: no unauthorized parties

should be able to access private information; Com-

pliance: laws and policies should be kept into con-

sideration; Availability: information should be efﬁ-

ciently and accurately retrieved; Retention: informa-

tion should remain accessible for a period of time de-

pending on legal, regulatory, ﬁscal, operational, and

historical requirements; Disposition: it should be pos-

sible to erase all the information that is no longer

needed.

The following functional requirements are es-

sential for recordkeeping (Garc

ıa-Barriocanal et al.,

2017): a) resource discovery/information retrieval; b)

resource management; c) resource use by appropri-

ate audiences; d) security; e) linking with related re-

sources; f) software and hardware needs.

Resource discovery and information retrieval

should include an easy and fast way to search art-

works and their related information. Results of

searches should depend on the type of audiences: ev-

ery artwork’s owner should decide which information

can be accessed by others. An appropriate ontology,

such as the Dublin Core Ontology (Weibel, 1997),

should be deﬁned to represent artworks and permit an

appropriate search by properties.

Resource management should guarantee the ac-

quisition of news about each minor artwork, such as

a temporary movement to an exhibit or a theft. Ev-

ery artwork movement should be traceable and doc-

umented. In addition, only authorized users, such as

the artwork’s owner, should be able to register an art-

work movement.

Resource use by appropriate audiences should de-

ﬁne access control policies on artworks. Access con-

trol on information about artworks should guarantee

the following aspects: 1) only its owner should add

an artwork, 2) the artwork’s owner should be aware

of who can access and update his/her artwork, 3) only

ARMA International is a not-for-proﬁt professional asso-

ciation and a global authority on governing information as

a strategic asset

A Blockchain-based Application to Protect Minor Artworks

321

authorized users could access an artwork, 4) a group

of supervisor users should manage artworks in terms

of approvals/rejects.

Security of minor artworks should concern the fol-

lowing aspects: privacy, authenticity and integrity.

Privacy is a security property which allows only au-

thorized users to access data. Authenticity is the prop-

erty of attributing records to their legitimate authors.

Integrity refers to the property of guaranteeing that

a record has not been modiﬁed by anyone. Integrity

should be provided through a tamper-proof environ-

ment, where every artwork is not modiﬁed by unau-

thorized users.

Linking is one of the most interesting aspects that

a system for recordkeeping should provide. Linking

should concern both relations among artworks of the

same archive (internal linking) and among artworks of

different archives (external linking). In general, link-

ing is not a simple task, because it cannot be made

completely automatic. Human operators, in fact, must

check that links among resources are correct, in order

to guarantee the quality of links.

Software and hardware needs refer to digital

preservation of artworks thus making them available

over time. Recordkeeping should take care of storage

media instability and deterioration, which could lead

to data loss, and technology obsolescence and incom-

patibility, which may happen both at the hardware and

software level.

Moreover, we took into consideration the the ISO

Standard 15489-1:2016 Information and documenta-

tion Records management(ISO, 2016), that deﬁnes

concepts and principles for the creation, acquisition

and management of records. Section 7.2 Character-

istics of a record lists the following: Authenticity:

records must be created and maintained in such a way

that creators are authorized and identiﬁed, and that

records are protected against unauthorized addition,

deletion, alteration, use and concealment; Reliability:

the content of a record should be accurate, and its

creator should be worth of trust; Integrity: a record

should be complete and protected against unautho-

rized alteration. Every alteration should be docu-

mented and traceable; Usability: a usable record is

one that can be located, retrieved, presented and in-

terpreted.

All the described functional requirements are con-

sidered in this paper, but linking, which is deferred as

future work and investigation.

5 MAPP

In order to satisfy almost all the requirements of

recordkeeping, we propose MApp, a system which

combines and exploits the beneﬁts of blockchain and

IPFS. The use of blockchain for recordkeeping is able

to satisfy some of the requirements described in Sec-

tion 4. In particular, a blockchain satisﬁes resource

management and resource use by appropriate audi-

ences indirectly, resource discovery/information re-

trieval, security directly (Garc

ıa-Barriocanal et al.,

2017). The use of IPFS for recordkeeping can guar-

antee digital preservation of minor artworks. Linking

with related resources cannot be guaranteed neither

by a blockchain nor by an IPFS, because it requires

an additional logic, based for example on mechanisms

deﬁned by Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001)

and Linked Data (Bizer et al., 2011). Currently, this

aspect is out the scope of this paper. We defer this

kind of research to future work.

5.1 Users

Users of the system may play one of the following

roles: generic user, publisher, veriﬁer. A generic user

can search for an approved artwork in the system. The

search can be done by artwork author or title. A pub-

lisher user can publish or update an artwork in the

system. When a new artwork is published, its status

is set to pending. This means that the artwork is not

approved yet thus cannot be accessed by third par-

ties neither can be updated by its author. A veriﬁer

is an expert in the ﬁeld to which the artwork belongs,

and can vote for the approval of the artwork descrip-

tion. If an artwork reaches a certain number of votes

(a parameter that can be set in the system), its status

becomes approved, thus it can be searched by generic

users and updated by its publisher. This mechanism

based on votes constitutes a basic algorithm for com-

pliance with the principle of reliability of a record.

More complex strategies can be deﬁned and we defer

this kind of study to future work.

5.2 Artwork Description

Every minor artwork is described through some prop-

erties deﬁned through vocabularies. Although there

are many more or less formal standards for the de-

scription of artworks, in our system we exploit two

vocabularies: Dublin Core

and extended Dublin

http://www.dublincore.org/speciﬁcations/dublin-core/

dces/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

WEBIST 2019 - 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

322

Table 1: Properties deﬁned in Dublin Core and the Ex-

tended Dublin Core.

Property DC Extended DC

Abstract 7 3

Access Rights 7 3

Accrual Periodicity

7 3

Alternative Title 7 3

Contributor 3 3

Coverage 3 3

Creator 3 3

Date 3 7

Date Available 7 3

Date Created 7 3

Date Modiﬁed 7 3

Description 3 3

Format 3 3

Identiﬁer 3 3

Language 3 3

License 7 3

Member Of 7 3

Publisher 3 3

Relation 3 3

Rights 3 3

Spatial Coverage 7 3

Source 3 3

Subject 3 3

Temporal Coverage 7 3

Title 3 3

Type 3 3

Version 7 3

Core

. Dublin Core provides 15 basic properties to

describe artworks. Extended Dublin Core allows a

more detailed description of an artwork, through the

use of qualiﬁers (or subclasses) that allow a reﬁne-

ment of the scheme with the addition of more precise

meanings on the basic terms. Each Dublin Core ele-

ment is optional and may be repeated. Table 1 shows

which properties are present in the two sets.

The choice of these metadata elements was made

by taking into account two factors. First of all, we

tried to choose vocabularies able to represent the vast

set of typologies of minor artworks. Secondly, we

chose a compromise between the complexity of the

description, the ease of use for a non-expert user and

the degree of precision of the system used. For this

reason, a user can choose one of the two sets to rep-

resent their artworks. Dublin Core provides a meta

information scheme designed to assign reasonably

broad properties to any digital material. It is a ﬂex-

ible, simple and extensible scheme that is suitable for

most of the foreseen use cases.

http://dublincore.org/speciﬁcations/dublin-core/

dcmi-terms/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

5.3 Operations

As already said, a publisher can perform two opera-

tions: publish and update an artwork.

Algorithm 1: Publish(artwork).

f ← artwork. f acsimiles

m ← artwork.metadata

s ← subset(m)

binary1 ← trans f orm( f )

if binary1 then

hash1 ← upload to ip f s(binary1)

if hash1 then

m∗ ← artwork.metadata + hash1

binary2 ← trans f orm(m∗)

if binary2 then

hash2 ← upload to ip f s(binary2)

if hash2 then

result ← add to blockchain(hash2, s)

return result

end if

return FALSE

Algorithm 1 shows the pseudocode of the publish

operation. Every artwork is composed of one or more

facsimiles and some metadata, done through one of

the previously described vocabularies. The facsimiles

are converted in binary data (through the transform

function) and then uploaded to the IPFS (through the

upload to ipfs function). The upload returns an hash

for each facsimile, and the hashes are included in the

artwork metadata. The metadata undergoe the pre-

vious two steps (transform and upload to ipfs). The

returned hash of the metadata is then saved in the

blockchain, together with a small subset of the art-

work metadata, used for the search operation.

The function for update is similar to that for publi-

cation: it receives the artwork and its new metadata as

input; if the status is approved, the new metadata are

transformed to binary and then updated in the IPFS.

If this last operation is successful, the new metadata

are added to the blockchain.

Algorithm 2 shows the search function, which re-

ceives a metadata as input. The metadata can be

either an author or an artwork name. The function

searches for the metadata in the blockchain and re-

turns the list of matching artworks pointers. For each

retrieved artwork pointer, the complete artwork infor-

mation (metadata and facsimiles) is taken from IPFS

and added to the result.

A Blockchain-based Application to Protect Minor Artworks

323

Algorithm 2: Search(metadata).

artwork list ← get by tag blockchain(metadata)

result ← 0

if artwork list then

for artwork pointer in artwork list do

hash ← artwork pointer.hash

artwork ← get ip f s(hash)

result.append(artwork)

end for

end if

return result

6 IMPLEMENTATION

Figure 1: The system architecture.

Figure 1 illustrates the MApp architecture, which is

composed of three elements: a) the front-end (Web

User Interface), b) the back-end (blockchain), c) the

data lake (IPFS). The front-end provides the users

with all the operations to manage artworks. The back-

end contains the transactions concerning every art-

work. The data lake contains all the artworks (fac-

similes and metadata), which can be accessed through

the description hash contained in the blockchain. As

back-end the Ethereum blockchain

was used. For the

Data Lake, MApp exploits IPFS. In order to establish

the connection between the back-end and the front-

end, javascript and web3.js

were used, while for the

connection between the back-end and the data lake,

Infura

was exploited. The source code of MApp can

be downloaded from GitHub

. There is also a live

version of MApp

(available only in Italian).

https://www.ethereum.org/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.2.0/ Access Date:

2019-07-29

https://infura.io/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

https://github.com/lukasd2/Digital-Archives-dApp

Access Date: 2019-07-29

https://lukasd2.github.io/Digital-Archives-dApp/src/

artworks.html Access Date: 2019-07-29

6.1 The Web User Interface

On the left side of the Web Interface (Footnote 11)

it is possible to activate the module for inserting an

object and to consult the main information relating to

the active user (the user address, the token balance

and the permissions). The central section contains the

list of all the artworks recorded on the blockchain and

the main information about each object. It also allows

you to ﬁlter objects based on their approval status and

search by title. The part on the right shows the com-

plete description and the facsimiles of a selected art-

work, extracted from the Data Lake.

6.2 The Blockchain

As already said, MApp exploits the Ethereum

blockchain to manage artworks. All the artworks are

stored into an Archive, which is represented by the

following smart contract, written in Solidity

contract Archive{

mapping (uint => Artwork) public artworks;

uint artworkCounter;

function publishArtwork(...){...}

function updateArtwork(...){...}

function searchArtwork(...){...}

function approveArtwork(...){...}

}

The artworks variable contains all the artworks, both

approved and not approved yet, artworkCounter

contains the current number of artworks contained in

the archive. The functions deﬁne all the operations

that can be done on the archive: publish, update,

search and approve an artwork.

Every artwork is deﬁned by a structure contain-

ing: the Artwork ID, the address of the author of the

description, the artwork name or title, the hash of the

complete description of the artwork on IPFS, the hash

of the representative image associated to the artwork

on IPFS, the approval status (true if approved or false

if not approved yet), the number of positive votes for

approval.

Users management is implemented through three

well-known contracts (Whitelist.sol, RBAC.sol

and Roles.sol), taken from the OpenZeppelin li-

brary

. These contracts are used to add users to the

list of advanced users, which can vote for artworks

approvals.

https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.5.5/ Access Date:

2019-07-29

https://openzeppelin.org/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

WEBIST 2019 - 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

324

6.3 The Data Lake

As already said, the Data Lake is implemented

through IPFS. When a user publishes a new artwork,

this is added to the Data Lake, where it is identiﬁed

through a unique description hash that guarantees that

information is not changed without a corresponding

update transaction. The same description hash is also

stored in the blockchain, together with some basic in-

formation (such as the artwork author) and its status.

7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we have described MApp, a blockchain-

based application, aimed to be an aid for the protec-

tion of minor artworks. We have described numerous

advantages of the use of blockchain to protect Cul-

tural Heritage. First of all, a blockchain is intrinsi-

cally distributed, in the sense that data are not hosted

by a single central authority, thus all the information

it stores is replicated on all the nodes of the network.

This means that there is no single point of failure, so

the archive is protected against accidental data loss or

malicious attempts to erase information during a theft.

In addition, in case of artworks destruction, caused

for example by a natural disaster, the blockchain may

contribute to keep the artworks memory for an indef-

inite period of time. Secondly, only authorized users

can add/update artworks, thus preventing counterfeit-

ing of the descriptions, and all the changes to the art-

work description are documented and remain trace-

able in case of audits. It is worth mentioning, though,

that identity authentication is performed by checking

if a transaction is signed with a correct private key.

That is, identity is associated with key ownership,

with no guarantees over the real identity of the owner

of that key. As future work, we would like to vali-

date the implemented solution through experiments,

and test it in a real use-case, i.e. to store objects con-

tained in local and small museums. In addition, we

would like to test the beneﬁts of implementing the

system using another type of blockchain, such as Hy-

perledger

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Lukasz Szczygiel for his the-

sis work in the implementation of MApp.

https://www.hyperledger.org/ Access Date: 2019-07-29

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