Blockchain-Enabled Secure Internet of Things

Blockchain-Enabled Secure Internet of Things

Vinod Kumar, Gotam Singh Lalotra
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-7132-6.ch008
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Abstract

This century is the time of ubiquitous, smart, and intelligent devices. These devices have a wide variety of applications in different fields like business, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, education, security, transportation, etc. Internet of things is now becoming the inexorable part of the all these fields. But security has always been a major concern in embracing these technologies. The blockchain technology is the next frontier for securing the internet of things. It will play a pivotal role to secure the communication in internet of things ecosystem. This chapter discusses the blockchain-enabled secure internet of things (IoT).
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2. Background

A blockchain is a distributed ledger that maintains a growing number of data records and transactions. As transactions are related to network participants, they are documented in blocks. They are arranged in the right sequence and assigned a record timestamp when they are added. It is a decentralised technology with the removal of intermediaries the tedious inconvenient banking process can be bypassed which is cost and time efficient. Cryptographic algorithms support the blockchain technology which ensure the prevention of data distortion and ensure high security. The intermediate block on the database cannot be replaces as every block has a hash to the previous block. A block can be extended but cannot be changed.

Generally, Blockchain Technology can be categorised in two core types- public blockchain and private blockchain. (Z Zheng, et al. 2017)

  • ❖ In a public blockchain, everyone can read or write data. Some public blockchains limit the access to just reading or writing. Bitcoin, for example, uses an approach where anyone can write.

  • ❖ In a private blockchain, all the participants are well known and trusted. This is useful when the blockchain is used between companies that belong to the same legal mother entity.

2.1. The Problem with the Current Centralized Model

The existing IoT ecosystems rely on centralized, brokered communication models also known as the server/client paradigm. All devices are identified, authenticated and connected through cloud servers that support huge processing and storage capacities. Connection between devices has to be established through the internet, whatsoever the distance in-between is.

While this model has connected generic computing devices for many years, and will support small-scale IoT networks for years to come, but will not cater the need of growing huge IoT ecosystems of future.

Current IoT solutions faces many challenges because the networking equipments, large server farms and centralised clouds involves very high expenditure for infrastructure development and their maintenance. As the IoT devices grow to billions consequently it will involve a large amount of investment.

Cloud servers will remain a bottleneck and point of failure for the entire network, even if the economic engineering and economic challenges are overcome. No single platform to support IoT. Diversity of ownership of devices and the assisting cloud infrastructure makes machine-to machine (M2M) communication difficult.

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