[H]ERC : The Human Protocol was designed and developed by a world class distributed team to Help Eradicate Racketeering and Collusion in Supply Chains by Decentralizing the Data Integrity of Performance Reports.
Leveraging Layered Blockchain Technologies the Hercules Platform is based on a set of protocols powered by HERC tokens.
Human Initiated Performance Report or HIPRAs HERC works fundamentally on a Tri-Party system. It is imperative that each entity have no relation to the interests of either of the other two. Due to the
decentralized nature of Blockchain technology, crowdsourcing the essential review function within our DApp is not only necessary, but a requirement.
Introducing Human Initiated Performance Reporting or HIPR. With HIPR, the HERC DApp will bring incentivised
gamification to the mundane task of auditing documents.
Using steganography, encrypting the data of each IPFS Data Module into a dynamic visual file HIPR will generate a puzzle. Steganography in HIPR
Context
When HIPR requests a new puzzle from the server, it receives an hash. The hash represents the puzzle and it is an encrypted and SHA256-ed string. This hash contains data we want to compare (with original data) and validate on server end.
Puzzle generation
To correctly generate a puzzle we perform two main steps:
- we choose the puzzle type and we pick a specific texture accordingly (this is based on some internal rules)
we perform a steganography pass on this texture, by encoding the received hash
EncodingThe encoding is performed with steganography algorithm. In few words, it is the process to mask a message within an image/texture in a way that it is not visible to the eye. We use this implementation of the algorithm: basically it translates the message in bits and encodes them in the alpha channel of the image.
GoalTo human-validate this data, we encode this hash in the puzzles structure and we shuffle the puzzle.
In this state, if the player tries to decode the hash from the puzzle, they obtain an invalid result. The player has to solve the puzzle in order to decode correctly the hash.
The user does not know what data is contained in that hash, they only know it has to be reordered to complete the puzzle.
When the user finishes the puzzle they will be rewarded. A mean average of all HIPR Reports (from the human swarm) will be taken at the end of every audit cycle and shown to the community.
Performance Reporting Internal Control:It is the first ever gamified Internal Review function; whereas the software validates the integrity of the chain data and secures the network through human initiation of smart contract completing checksums.
We are building it on Unity3D, with C# and targeting WebGL to execute distributed code contracts (smart contracts) compiled in Solidity.
one or multiple picture angles, taken from the supply chain managers device.
Compressed Video Evidence provides pixelization changes over time dramatically reducing cost overtime. This is a future development of HERC Protocols.
Specified Markings (serial numbers, assayer, manufacturer, color, etc).
Scientific Test Results (Analysis)
Human Swarm (PoHW/HIPR)
Only humans are capable of or have:
Intuition
Opinion
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Reputation
Purpose Driven Human Micro Tasking with Human Initiated Performance ReportingHIPR is an innovative approach to ordering and validating transaction in the Hercules Supply Chain which replaces costly massive computing power and electricity with Proof of Human Work which incentivises human pkayers to solve puzzles that initiate smart contract functionality. This is also a batching process that extends TPS by a viewed 5x on average. The details of how this innovative approach are as follows.
we choose the puzzle type and we pick a specific texture accordingly (this is based on some internal rules)
we perform a steganography pass on this texture, by encoding the received hash
How does it work?When assets metrics are uploaded (both that of an originator and a recipient relative to the specific touchpoint in the supply chain) a puzzle is generated and marked as unsolved.
When a player starts the game, an unsolved puzzle is pulled from the blockchain.
Metrics are encoded in the puzzle games texture with steganography and puzzle is shuffled.
When the player solves the puzzle, fractional HERC is awarded to the player.
Metrics are decrypted and sent to the compare and contrast contract, to validate them.
The game already has an auto-login feature: the first time the user logs in, his credentials are stored and reused automatically for the next login with no user interaction.
The login uses a Bilateral ECDSA keypair in a split encryption environment for user security.
Web ServiceThe Web Service is a REST API middle layer that collects players requests, sanitizes them and pushes them to specific smart contracts. We are implementing this due to cheaters and bad actors: we are concerned that a direct access to smart contracts from a client side can be a potential security risk.
Main requests solved in the RESTful HIPR:
Game MechanicsThe game starts when puzzle data is received: a puzzle is generated based on received data and metrics are encoded in its texture.
Once the puzzle is solved, data is decoded and it is sent to the compare and contrast service, to validate the result.
The score is generated by considering how much time and how many moves the player spent to solve the puzzle. Best scores will be saved to the leaderboard and they will be globally visible.
Currently weve planned to have a few different puzzle games: sliding-tiles puzzle and a matching colors.
But we will certainly add new puzzles and challenges including brain training as we scale.
LoginCurrently we are logging in directly inside the dapp, by pinging an Infura node. Users will seamlessly be organized via a shared login service from their Edge account.
It can generate a login token that we can easily use to identify the session, without asking for credentials (address + private key) every time.
Login: to have a shared login service, It will process the user address + private key.
Get puzzle data: we want to receive an unsolved puzzle when the game starts, so we have to request for it.
Verify solved data: here we want to collect results from the puzzle: solved metrics, timer, moves count, etc. We want to sanitize/verify them and push them to smart contracts.
Smart ContractsThe puzzleManager.sol contract takes the two data sets, creates a new puzzle, encrypts them into the puzzle itself and serves the community the puzzle to be solved.After the player wins the puzzle the assetValidation.sol contract receives the new decrypted metric data and compares and contrasts the two arrays. These lists act as checksums against each other and notify the original users if there is an issue.
The playerScore.sol contract receives the users score and inserts it into a leaderboard which is on the blockchain.
We have various partners and layered technologies we'd like to thank for making this all possible