Impact of Blockchain for Internet of Things Security

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a major role in the industry and is encouraging researchers to come up with various applications by bringing economical and social benefits to society. This is having an incredible impact on various environments using common operating picture ranging from mission-critical applications to business-oriented applications like healthcare, transportation, video surveillance, banking, etc. Common operating picture is achieved with the help of advancements seen in WSN devices, which are able to communicate with each other for the exchange of information and allow the data analysis for various purposes. The information is exchanged among the devices using the central server of cloud or fog, raising various security vulnerabilities. Not only the servers, but the IoT devices themselves will have security vulnerabilites which can be exploited by attacks like device spoofing, false authentication, etc. Taking into consideration the predicted evolution of IoT in the coming years, it is required to provide confidence in the users that the data they store or exchange and the devices they use for the purpose of security and privacy is preserved. The IoT objects are interconnected to each other but the functions of these vary from each other, which will not yield better security results with the conventional approaches. To address security and privacy concerns, the central server concept is eliminated and blockchain technology is introduced as a part of IoT. Blockchain, which is used for Bitcoin, has been recently used to provide security in peer-to-peer network, which is similar to IoT technology. This chapter explains the various applications of IoT fol lowed by the security and privacy issues. It discusses the challenges involved in securing IoT followed by an introduction to blockchain technology along with various advantages of blockchain for IoT. It also discusses the application domains of blockchain technology in IoT, classification of threat models that are considered by blockchain protocols for IoT networks, and a comparison of state-of-the-art secure models with respect to blockchain. At the end, the chapter highlights the open challenges and further research directions in blockchain technology for IoT. © 2020 Scrivener Publishing LLC.