Blockchain in internet of things: Challenges and Solutions

📝 Abstract

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.

💡 Analysis

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.

📄 Content

Blockchain in Internet of Things: Challenges and Solutions Ali Dorri, Salil S. Kanhere, and Raja Jurdak

Abstract
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 BC’s 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. Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents one of the most significant disruptive technologies of this century. It is a natural evolution of the Internet (of computers) to embedded and cyber- physical systems, “things” that, while not obviously computers themselves, nevertheless have computers inside them. With a network of cheap sensors and interconnected things, information collection on our world and environment can be achieved at a much higher granularity. Indeed, such detailed knowledge will improve efficiencies and deliver advanced services in a wide range of application domains including pervasive healthcare and smart city services. However, the increasingly invisible, dense and pervasive collection, processing and dissemination of data in the midst of people’s private lives gives rise to serious security and privacy concerns [1]. On the one hand, this data can be used to offer a range of sophisticated and personalized services that provide utility to the users. On the other hand, embedded in this data is information that can be used to algorithmically construct a virtual biography of our activities, revealing private behavior and lifestyle patterns. The privacy risks of IoT are exacerbated by the lack of fundamental security safeguards in many of the first generation IoT products on the market. Numerous security vulnerabilities have been identified in connected devices ranging from smart locks [2] to vehicles [3]. Several intrinsic features of IoT amplify its security and privacy challenges including: lack of central control, heterogeneity in device resources, multiple attack surfaces, context-aware and situational nature of risks, and scale.
Naturally, security and privacy for IoT is receiving a lot of attention within the research community. In [4], a distributed capability-based access control method is proposed to control access to sensitive information. However, their proposed method introduces excessive delays and overheads and could potentially compromise user privacy. Authors in [5] used IP- sec and TLS to provide authentication and privacy, but these methods are computationally Ali Dorri and Salil S. Kanhere are with The University of New South Wales (UNSW); Raja Jurdak is with CSIRO Brisbane. expensive and may thus be inappropriate for many resource-limited IoT devices. A privacy management method is proposed in [6] which measures the risk of disclosing data to others, however, in many circumstances, the perceived benefit of IoT services outweigh the risk of privacy loss. There is thus a need for privacy-aware sharing of IoT data without sacrificing the privacy of users. In summary, these and several other prior works have yet to address the aforementioned challenges in ensuring security and privacy for IoT in a comprehensive manner. In this article, we argue that the answer may lie in the fundamental technology that underscores emerging cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin [7], the world’s first decentralized digital currency was launched in 2008. Bitcoin is underpinned by a peer-to-peer computer network that is made of its users’ machines, similar to BitTorrent. In addition, a changeable Public Key (PK) is used as user’s identity1 to provide anonymity and privacy. The main technology behind Bitcoin is called BlockChain (BC), an immutable public record of data

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.