Internet of Things and Blockchain Integration For Security and Privacy
Internet of Things and Blockchain Integration For Security and Privacy
Corresponding Author:
Amarsinh Vidhate
Department of Engineering and Technology, Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed University
Nerul, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra 400706, India
Email: [email protected]
1. INTRODUCTION
The internet of things (IoT) represents the next phase of Internet development, revolutionizing
communication and traditional applications by connecting computers and physical objects [1], [2]. This
transformation leads to enhancements in productivity and service quality. The "things" in the context of IoT
are any devices and objects in our surroundings with intelligence that communicate and exchange
information within a vast network [3], [4]. In addition, blockchain is an immutable, timestamped, tamper-
resistant, auditable, and permanent ledger of blocks designed for the storage and sharing of data in a peer-to-
peer (P2P) manner. Initially, blockchain was used in cryptocurrency, recently blockchain has been applied
beyond cryptocurrencies in areas such as identity management, Industry 4.0, intelligent transportation, supply
chain management, and healthcare. These features include security, transactional privacy, integrity,
authorization, censorship resistance, data immutability, auditability, system transparency, and fault tolerance
[1], [4]. The IoT is significantly contributing to smart city projects and driving the next industry revolution
“Industry 4.0” with diverse applications in various sectors [5], [6]. Revenue generated by IoT applications
across various sectors is projected to grow from $892 billion (about $2,700 per person in the US) in 2018 to
an estimated $4 trillion (about $12,000 per person in the US) by 2025 [4]. IoT applications primarily focus on
automating various daily tasks and enabling objects to function without human intervention. However,
realizing this vision and meeting the increasing demand requires robust security measures, privacy
protection, reliable authentication mechanisms, and effective safeguards against potential attacks [5]‒[7].
The IoT has a large technology stack and different layers of architecture, due to such heterogeneous
and dynamic nature of IoT-based intelligent environments gives rise to a unique set of authentication, privacy
and security concerns and challenges at different layers of the IoT architecture [8]‒[10]. IoT solutions have
challenges like limited storage, computing power, networking capabilities, and power supply [8]‒[10]. The
fundamental security goals of traditional internet systems, namely confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and
availability along with recovery from attack must be addressed effectively and are also crucial for IoT
networks. Additionally, standardized security policies and assessment frameworks for deployments are
essential [11]‒[13]. Existing assessments and security standards, although not specifically tailored to
IoT-based smart environments [14], [15]. There are various approaches to address the IoT security and
privacy challenges learning base countermeasures, encryption, fog computing, edge computing, machine
learning and blockchain base approach [16]‒[18].
Blockchain integration with IoT can provide the best security, authenticity, and privacy, but all these
advantages come with various integration challenges like resource constraint devices, performance, high
volume data, and layered IoT architecture [19]‒[25]. Address security and privacy challenges for dynamic
IoT architecture influenced by physical deployment demand standard framework to address unique security
challenges. We have proposed a novel generic framework to deploy any IoT application. The framework
expects any IoT application to analyse the environment with standard assessment framework parameters to
deploy, govern, and protect. In our research, we have proposed a novel generic framework for primary
security measures for heterogeneous layered IoT architecture with the integration of blockchain technology
with promising security [26]‒[30]. To address layered architecture integration challenges the proposed
framework uses customized blockchain architecture integrated with layered IoT architecture. The proposed
framework uses lightweight ECC curve cryptography for key exchange, encryption and digital signature,
BLAKE2 for message digest for customized blockchain along lightweight miners with a DAG consensus
mechanism.
The paper presented an overview of a novel security framework with blockchain integration.
Section 2 of this paper presented an overview of the proposed assessment and IoT and blockchain in
integration framework with the experimental setup. Our proposed framework addresses several challenges
related to the integration of blockchain technology, paving the way for enhanced security and privacy in IoT
applications. The work also discussed result analysis with different framework components in section 3.
2. METHOD
This research work aims to develop a standard security framework to ensure confidentiality,
integrity, authenticity, and availability for IoT with integration with blockchain and overcome the challenges
in integration. In this research work, we have presented interim details of the framework. The proposed
framework for integration of IoT and blockchain has considered a layered and heterogeneous IoT
environment, along with a large technology stack, challenges in blockchain integration and security
framework should be generic and can apply to any IoT application. This research has considered layered IoT
architecture with a physical or sensing layer, network layer, middleware layer and application. The IoT
layered architecture is extended with the dew layer as an extension to the physical layer and the cloudlet layer
as an extension to the middleware layer [31]‒[37].
To deploy any IoT application with our proposed framework, assessment parameters will be helpful
to deploy, govern, and protect IoT networks with layered functionalities and integration with blockchain to
ensure security and privacy. We have proposed the standard assessment guidelines for the deployment of IoT
applications with layered architecture. The assessment framework helps to ensure secure IoT deployment,
and effectively manage and continuously protect heterogeneous IoT environments, which helps to define a
generic security framework. The proposed assessment framework is broken down into seven key functions as
following:
− Identify: any deployment must identify how to manage cyber security risk to people, systems, capabilities,
assets, and data including physical environment, asset management, and information technology
governance along with application requirements to configure layered IoT architecture and blockchain
integration parameters for cryptography, smart contract, and data buffer.
− Categorize: any deployment must categorize the requirements based on how the system and information
are processed, stored, and transmitted based on impact analysis.
− Implement: any deployment must document and implement the environment based on the above two
measures.
− Protect: any deployment must document and implement appropriate security measures and blockchain
integration in the environment based on the above two measures.
− Govern: any deployment must develop and implement a governance structure to understand the
organization’s risk and priorities for IoT and blockchain.
− Assess: any deployment must assess the current state of implementation.
− Recover: any deployment must have a recovery plan to ensure resilience and restore to ensure availability.
The proposed generic framework for IoT layered implementation aims at achieving primary security
and privacy concerns for IoT due to a heterogeneous environment with blockchain integration as shown in
Figure 1. We have also considered challenges for IoT like the elimination of central authority, secure
deployment of the new node, and challenges with IoT and blockchain integration like resources constraint
environment, data concurrency, and high-velocity data handling for designing the layered framework. The
proposed framework has been designed by considering some fundamental design principles scalability,
reliability & performance, quality of service, and computational complexity.
The proposed framework has four important elements; i) secure boarding of new IoT devices and
onboarding of nodes at the edge/dew layer blockchain as well as at cloudlet layer, ii) customization of
blockchain at edge and middleware layer, iii) lightweight cryptographic measures, and iv) implementation of
smart contract and data queue to support many real-time IoT applications. The proposed framework
recommends implementing all four elements with help of various assessment parameters. The
implementation of all four elements has been discussed in subsequent paragraph.
The proposed research framework configures the cloud as a data store and application interfaces
responsible for analysing and processing data requested by authenticated users, things and blockchain nodes
by the cloudlet layer. The cloudlet layer is configured with a fully functional blockchain. The nodes in
cloudlet layers have two roles as mining nodes and blockchain participants. Each node in the cloudlet layer
will be assigned reputation or stake points which is based on the success ratio of miner. The miner's node
also responsible for maintaining stake for dew layer nodes. The dew layer is running with a lightweight
version of the blockchain. The dew layer node also has a reputation as stake points calculated on transaction
validity. The physical layer is deployed with various IoT devices registered with the IoT blockchain
Internet of things and blockchain integration for security and privacy (Sumita Kumar)
4040 ISSN: 2252-8938
framework as shown in Figure 2. Both cloudlet and dew layers are configured with a direct acyclic graph
(DAG) consensus mechanism, memory pool and are responsible for onboarding new nodes in the preceding
layer Figure 3.
The experimental setup analyses the integration with real-time data as well as our ATN simulator
with the DS2OS dataset. The node can work in two modes attacker and authenticate mode. We have analysed
all types of records in the dataset by creating transactions with the simulator for various IoT devices and then
transmitting them to the dew layer blockchain. The layer lightweight blockchain miner then validates the
authenticity of the sender and transaction with the DAG consensus mechanism. A dew layer smart contract
can be triggered if the transaction is critical and needs to be processed in real-time otherwise dew layer miner
creates a block of transaction periodically and sends it to the cloudlet layer. The cloudlet layer miner again
validates the block before proceeding with the blockchain. If the block is critical then a smart contract will be
executed to support real-time IoT applications. If transactions are unauthenticated or there is an intrusion at
the dew/cloudlet layer, then respective miners drop the transaction. As all communications are securely
communicated, validated and stored with lightweight cryptographic measures and blockchain technology.
(a) (b)
Figure 4. The performance ECC and DAG with proposed framework; (a) RSA Vs DSA Vs ECC Vs ECC
(distributed key space), and (b) DAG Vs PoS Vs PoW
The Figure 5(a) represents comparison of time complexity for critical data block Vs smart contract
trigger time for IoT blockchain mechanism to support real time IoT application. The Figure 5(b) the
performance of proposed system with DS2OS intrusion detection dataset. The blockchain base IoT network
perform much better, and another benefit is blockchain intrinsic characteristic of immutable database and
ensure confidentiality, authenticity and availability.
Internet of things and blockchain integration for security and privacy (Sumita Kumar)
4042 ISSN: 2252-8938
(a)
(b)
Figure 5. Performance of smart contract with framework and intrusion detection with DS2OS dataset;
(a) critical transaction Vs time complexcity, and (b) DS2OS data result
The graphs in Figure 6(a) shows our analysis for registration time for device and dew layer IoT node
registration time as authorize devices registration is also very important as IoT marketplace is growing very
rapidly. The registration of IoT device involves handshaking between IoT device and dew layer blockchain to
generate and secure sharing of secret keys for further communication. The Figure 6(b) shows performance
measurement for live registration of dew layer node registration with blockchain and distributed IoT
application as secure onboarding of node is necessary to keep system secure from malicious nodes.
(a) (b)
Figure 6. Analysis performance measurement of (a) dew layer blockchain node (IoT gateway), and
(b) physical layer new device registration
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented an overview of the current state of the art of IoT, blockchain, and
features of blockchain along with the integration challenges. This paper also provides an overview of As the
IoT market is growing very rapidly, it is necessary to ensure primitive security measures with consideration
of distributed and heterogeneous environments. Blockchain is intrinsically distributed in nature and ensures
confidentiality, authenticity, and availability. This paper presented work on an assessment framework to
deploy any IoT base environment and we have presented our work on a security framework with IoT and
Blockchain integration. In this paper, we have proposed a customized blockchain for IoT-based environments
and our experimental setup with analysis.
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BIOGRAPHIES OF AUTHORS