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Block chain: A Game Changer for Securing IoT Data

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Universal Review ISSN NO : 2277-2723

Block chain: A Game Changer for Securing IoT Data

Dr. B. V. Ramana Reddy
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Nalanda Institute of
Engineering and Technology, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India. 522438
E-mail:[email protected]

Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) is now in its initial stage, but very soon, it is going to influence
almost every day-to-day items we use. The more it will be included in our lifestyle, more
will be the threat of it being misused. There is an urgent need to make IoT devices secure
from getting cracked. Very soon IoT is going to expand the area for the cyber-attacks on
homes and businesses by transforming objects that were used to be offline into online
systems. Existing security technologies are just not enough to deal with this problem.
Block chain has emerged as the possible solution for creating more secure IoT systems in
the time to come. In this paper, first an overview of the blockchain technology and its
implementation has been explained; then we have discussed the infrastructure of IoT
which is based on Block chain network and at last a model has been provided for the
security of internet of things using blockchain. Index Terms—Internet of things, Block
chain, Security, Devices, Network.

Keywords: We would like to encourage you to list your keywords in this section

1. Introduction
Block chain technology is now getting too much of attention from software scientists
since it has been cre- ated. Fig 1 shows the basic pillars of blockchain technology in
internet world. Actually, it has the ability to revolutionize and optimize the global
infrastructure of the technologies connected with each other through internet. It has
mainly two fields that are going to be influenced by it which are:

 By creating a decentralized system, it removes the indulgence of central servers

and provides peer-to-peer interaction.
 It can create a fully transparent and open to all database, which could bring
transparency to the governance and elections.
Blockchain technology basically has 4 pillars, first, Consensus, which provides the proof
of work (PoW) and verifies the action in the networks, second is ledger, which provides
the complete details of transaction within networks. Third, Cryptography, it makes sure
that all data in ledger and networks gets encrypted and only authorized user can decrypt
the information and fourth is smart contract, it is used to verify and validate the
participants of the network. IoT is maturing very fast and making its presence felt in
almost every field of technology. However, with its rapid evolution, it has made itself
more prone to cyber-attacks. Now there is an urgency to make IoT more secure [1].
Internet-Of-Things (IoT) refers to a loosely coupled, a system of multiple heterogeneous
and homogeneous devices having the power of sensing, processing, and network
capabilities [2]. Internets of Things have been discussed aptly with semantic touch in the
IoT vision [3].The current scenario for making a safe and secure car is to lock your car
automatically or manually. We become sure of its safety and security [4]. Our future
generation cars would be having all sensors based devices and at the same time connected
in to the system [5]. The cars with these devices make our car smart but are they safe?
This is the pertinent question which compels us to write a more safe architecture for
making our cars based on IoT devices safe and secure and connected to the Internet every

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time [6]. The purpose of this research paper is to provide guidance for the use of block
chain technology, through cases to make a more secure and trustable IoT model.

Fig.1. Pillars of block chain technology

II. CONCERNS WITH IMPLEMENTATION IOT

IoT has numerous applications, for example: in making smart homes, Smart City,
Improving Health, Autonomous Vehicles, etc. Some IoT devices are currently available in
the market like Wearables, Smart Thermostat Systems, Air Conditioners, and refrigerators
that use Wi-Fi for remote monitoring. Apart from all these benefits, IoT has some serious
issues, which should be sorted out before it gets implemented, like the technologies on
which the foundations of IoT have been established have several bugs, so if hackers get
access to the system through these bugs then they can compromise the privacy of the
customer or even can cause harm to them. Thus before implementing IoT, the security of
these systems should be strengthened and made free from any bugs. Keeping the IoT
device secure is one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish. In making these devices
cheap, small and easy to use many security policies are compromised which increases the
risk of security breach. In figure 2 shows the taxonomy of the IoT security.

Fig.2. Taxnomy of iot technology

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III. OVERVIEW OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Block chain is a kind of decentralized database, which keeps record of every transaction
made on a network. Rather than having a traditional central database like that of banks or
governments, it has a ledger distributed over a network of nodes. This network can be
public, like the internet, which is accessible to any person in the world or it can be private,
with accessibility given to only members of an organization. Block chains decentralized
cryptographic model allows users to trust each other and make peer-to-peer transactions,
eliminating the need of intermediaries. This technology is not only affecting the way we
use internet, but the global economy has also being revolutionized [2].

A. Components of a Block chain

Block chain mainly has 4 components which form its complete infrastructure. Fig.1
shows the component of block chain.
 Network of Nodes: All the nodes connected through the internet maintain all of
the transactions made on a block chain network collaboratively. The authenticity
of the transaction is checked by the protocol, which eliminates the involvement of
a trusted third party for validation purpose [3]. When a transaction is done, its
records are added to the ledger of past transaction, this process is known as
'mining'. The proof of work has to be verified by the other nodes present on the
network.
 Distributed database system: The database, which is composed of blocks of
information, is copied to every node of the system. Each block contains the
following data in itself: A list of transactions; a timestamp; Information, which
links it to the previous chain of the blocks.
 Shared ledger: The ledger is updated every time a transaction is made. It is
publicly available and is incorruptible which introduces transparency to the
system.
 Cryptography: It binds the data with the very strong crypto mechanism, which is
not easy to track or tampered by unauthorized users.

B. Constructing a block chain

A new digital transaction is made which is then con- verted into a cryptographically
protected block. Mem- bers of the blockchain network having high computation power
(Miners) compete with each other to validate the transaction by solving difficult coded
problems. First one to solve receives a reward (In case of bitcoin block chain, the miner
would get bitcoins). Then the validated block is time stamped and is added to the chain in

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chronological order. The acceptance of block by nodes is expressed when it creates

another block in the chain, using the hash of the earlier accepted block [4].

C. Implementing a Blockchain
Block chain can be mainly deployed in 3 domains [1].
 Public: Un-permissioned area, each and every node can send or read
transaction and can take part in the consensus process without the requiring
any permission. Bitcoin and Ethereum come under this category.
 Consortium area: It comes under partial permission, only defined nodes can
take part in the consensus process. The permission to read or send may be
made public or may be provided only to few authorized nodes.
 Private: It is the permission area, only the organization to whom the network
of blockchain belongs can write transaction to it. Reading of transaction may
be public or restricted to few nodes depending upon the requirement. This
type of system is generally deployed in industries.

IV. BLOCKCHAIN BASED INTERNET OF THINGS

Before we can go into the security aspects of IoT using blockchain technology, let us first
understand the pattern of IoT-based on blockchain technology.

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We have defined 3 of such patterns

A. Communication Model
In this model, mainly three of the fundamental functions of block chain network are
used.
Peer-to-peer messaging
Distributed data sharing.
Autonomous coordination with the device.
However, unfortunately, it has its own limitations, which make it problematic to
implement:
1) Slow Processing: Generally, low-end CPU are available which makes it hard for
processing, as computations in block chain require high CPU and memory to work
properly.
2) Small Storage: as more and more transactions are made the size of ledger goes on
increasing. However, companies such as IOTA [9], like block- chain tiny sensors, are
proposing new approaches: results a decrease in hardware require requirements by
simplifying the process of mining. In this context, an architecture has been illustrated
below: below (fig. 5), is a blockchain network with the implementation of technology:
mining, ledger, encryption, etc. Here, blockchain nodes are the members of the net- work,
participating actively in the transaction process. They validate the transaction through
mining; they can be personal computers, enterprise servers or also cloud- based nodes.
Clients are the IoT devices; they do not store the distributed ledger. Blockchain client’s
block- chain nodes interact with each other through APIs. IoT devices create transactions
and these transactions are relayed to blockchain nodes for processing and storing the data
into the distributed ledger. mHTTP REST APIs can be used to establish communication
between IoT and blockchain. They are specific for every blockchain node [5]. To avoid
any "man-in-the-middle-attack" which can affect transaction details or can cause a
double-spend, a complete trust must be established between clients and the nodes they are
connected with. Messages that are exchanged between multiple IoT devices contain data,
which are directly integrated in the transactions relayed by devices, which participate in
exchanges, to block- chain nodes [10].

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B. Connecting multiple blockchain networks

With the recent researches, it has been predicted that future is going to be constructed
by multiple blockchains, with each having different features and providing different
services. Here, Blockchain network may be a home network, enterprise or the internet.
Message formats and communication protocols between devices are out of the scope of
blockchain implementation: it refers to machine-tomachine communication [11]. If
artificial intelligence is added to the IoT environment that is connected to a blockchain
network it creates a Decentralize Autonomous Organization (DAO), DAO refers to an
organization that runs without any human intervention [12].

V. WAYS TO STRENGTHEN IOT SECURITY WITH

BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
Points that have to be considered to establish a secure IoT using technology. Fig. 7
shows the strength of blockchain those are built to secure IoT environment.

A. Secure communication
In some cases, IoT devices have to communicate for the purpose exchanging data
required to process a trans- action and to store it in a ledger. These ledgers can also be
used to store encryption keys to make the exchanges more confidential. IoT de- vice sends
an encrypted message using the public key of the destination device, which is then stored
in the block- chain network. The sender then asks its node to get public key of the

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receiver from the ledger. Then the sender encrypts the message using public key of the
receiver, in this way, only the receiver will be able to decrypt the sent message using their
private key [13].

B. Authentication of users:

The sender digitally signs the message before sending them to other devices. The
receiving device then gets the public key from the ledger and uses it to verify the digital
signature of the received message. We have describe the digital signature work at below:
 First, the sender calculates hash of a message that is then encrypted with its
private key.
 The digital signature along with the message is transmitted.
 The receiver then decrypts the digital signature using the public key of sender
stored in the ledger to obtain the hash value as calculated by the sender.
 The message is valid only if the calculated hash and the protected hash of the
message are same.
 The trust on retrieved messages is improved if the digital signature of each
message is stored into the ledger.

C. Discovering legitimate IoT at large scale

With potentially millions of IoT devices are to be connected on the same network, there is
an urgent need to get the ability to discover devices at scale and to dis- cern legitimate and
illegitimate nodes [14]. As soon as a new IoT device starts, it first asks root servers to
give a list of trusted nodes in the network. Then this device registers itself in a node, and
then the exchange of information starts. It receives information from other nodes and
sends its information to other peers on network. DNSSec has to be implemented to secure
name resolution of root servers by avoiding any spoofing attacks. In public network, this
enrollment method can be easily applied without any specific constraints. For private
network, it has to be made sure that only the legitimate devices can be added to the
blockchain network. For this, the root servers must authenticate the device before
providing it the nodes list. To ensure integrity and confidentiality, every communication
made must be authenticated and encrypted efficiently [15]. This can be done based upon:
 Credentials already installed on the device during setup: There should be a safe
process, which could be a part of blockchain implementation, which could
generate these credentials.
 Credentials could be given by the owner of the IoT device: It initializes the
process of device enrolment into the security server to get the credential for IoT.

D. Configuring IoT Blockchain technology helps a lot in establishing a

trusted and secure configuration for IoT devices. Approaches that
seem relevant here are:
 Properties of IoT like Configuration details and the last version firmware validated can
be hosted on the ledger. During bootstrap, the blockchain node is asked to get its
configuration from the ledger. The configuration is required to be en- crypted in the
ledger to prevent the discovery of IoT network topology or its properties by analysis of
the information stored in the public ledger.
 The hash value of latest configuration file for every device can be hosted in the ledger.
Using a cloud service the IoT device will have to down- load the latest and trusted
configuration file after every fixed interval of time ( say every night). Then the device can
use the blockchain node API to retrieve and match the hash value, which is stored in the
blockchain. This would allow the administrators to remove any bad configurations

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regularly and reboot each and every IoT device in the network with latest and trusted
configurations.
Fig.7. shows a series of IOT devices interconnected with each other on a network.
Securing them with a blockchain network makes the system decentralized, in which there
is no single authority which can approve any transaction. Each and every device will have
a copy of the ever growing chain of data. This means that whenever someone wishes to
access the device and do some transaction, then all the members of the network must
validate it. After the validation is done, the performed transaction is stored in a block and
is sent to all the nodes of the network. All this make the system more secure and
impossible for the un-authorized sources to breach into the security.

VI. CONCLUSION
In this article, we have provide guidance for the use of blockchain technology,
through cases to make a more secure and trustable IoT model. Because of the high-end
hardware requirements for the internet of things, we concluded that internet of things is
not going to be a full member of a blockchain network. But internet of things is definitely
going to be benefited from the functionalities introduced by the blockchain technology
through the APIs offered by the nodes of the network or by any specialized
intermediaries. Through these functionalities internet of things could be made highly
secure. We have discussed the new and emerging blockchain technology cybersecurity
point. Block chain technology, mostly using and concentrating the finance area research
work, as we know Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which is based on blockchain technology.
But in our article we try to introduce blockchain technology for internet of things to make
secure data transmission between the internet connected devices. For this we have provide
oview of blockchain technology, security issues on IoT environment and also discuss and
propose blockchain is as a solution of IoT Security.

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