Blockchain in internet of things: Challenges and Solutions

By Ali Dorri, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak. arXiv.org, 2016

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Internet of Things IoT is experiencing exponential growth in research and industry, but it still suffers from privacy and security vulnerabilities. Conventional security and privacy approaches tend to be inapplicable for IoT, mainly due to its decentralized topology and the resource-constraints of the majority of its devices. BlockChain BC that underpin the crypto-currency Bitcoin have been recently used to provide security and privacy in peer-to-peer networks with similar topologies to IoT. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for IoT devices. This position paper proposes a new secure, private, and lightweight architecture for IoT, based on BC technology that eliminates the overhead of BC while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. The described method is investigated on a smart home application as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. The proposed architecture is hierarchical, and consists of smart homes, an overlay network and cloud storages coordinating data transactions with BC to provide privacy and security. Our design uses different types of BCs depending on where in the network hierarchy a transaction occurs, and uses distributed trust methods to ensure a decentralized topology. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/451729b3faedea24771ac4aadbd267146688db9b

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of IoT Applications in Blockchain Systems (2020, background): “Despite the benefits of IoT blockchain, there are some challenges of adopting blockchain technology in IoT system [Atlam et al. 2018; Dorri et al. 2016; M.Padma et al. 2019; Ramachandran and Krishnamachari 2018; Reyna et al. 2018].”
Distributed Blockchain-Based Data Protection Framework for Modern Power Systems Against Cyber Attacks (2019, methodology): “[40], [41] analyzed the challenges and solutions of blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT) and proposed a method for the application of blockchain on a smart home environment.”
A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things (2018, background): “Another BIoT architecture is proposed in [91] and [92].”
Blockchain and IoT Integration: A Systematic Survey (2018, methodology): “[67,68]; IBM Hyperledger [75,76]; Lombardi et al.”
Blockchain with Internet of Things: Benefits, Challenges, and Future Directions (2018, background): “As shown in Fig.2 , according to [10] Although the blockchain is still new and in experimenting stage, it is being perceived as a revolutionary solution that addresses modern technology issues such as decentralization, identity, trust, data ownership and data-driven decisions [7].”
Blockchain for 5G-enabled IoT for industrial automation: A systematic review, solutions, and challenges (2020, background): “[16] proposed a secure and lightweight architecture for IoT, based on blockchain technology.”
Blockchain technology: Is it hype or real in the construction industry? (2020, background): “No record will be lost, and all the data originated from different organisations will be in a single blockchain network [83].”
Blockchain for IoT security and privacy: The case study of a smart home (2017, methodology): “These defense layers, that are granting permission by using CH key lists and changing the PK in the CH key lists, are discussed in our previous paper [6] and are not in the scope of this paper.”
Why do businesses go crypto? An empirical analysis of initial coin offerings (2018, background): “Applications other than cryptocurrencies include financial markets (Biella & Zinetti, 2016), custodian services, supply chain management, and trade finance (Ream, Chu, & Schatsky, 2016), Internet-of-Things (Dorri, Kanhere, & Jurdak, 2016), and policy making (Condos, Sorrell, & Donegan, 2016).”
A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “In [190]–[192], a private blockchain is used by the owner of a smart home to manage the communication among devices.”
Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “Further, the work in [44] extends blockchain to the three tiers of smart home, overlay network and cloud storage with different types of blockchains depending on different trust, privacy and fault tolerance requirements.”
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review and Directions for Future Research (2019, background): “in [158,159] proposed a novel lightweight architecture for networks comprising numerous IoT devices.”
Toward Blockchain-Based Accounting and Assurance (2017, background): “These technologies together represent the technical foundation of future commerce (Omohundro 2014; Deloitte 2016; Dorri, Kanhere, and Jurdak 2016; Ferrer 2016).”