A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Security Architecture for IoT

Advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) computing paradigm have made it a popular solution covering many areas such as smart cities, connected vehicles, smart farming etc. to provide major economic benefits, reduced resource consumption, smarter environments and increased sharing of resources among other advantages. However, the security issues arising from the scale of connectivity and heterogeneity of resources in IoT make it a hot target for attackers, where centralized security solutions fall short. The vulnerabilities in providing proper device authentication and data integrity in IoT networks have been shown to introduce devastating effects. This calls for designing a data security architecture for IoT, which can accurately authenticate devices by anyone in the network in a decentralized manner and prevent unauthorized modification of the stored data. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach for IoT systems that introduces transparency and tamper-resistance into data storage and retrieval in IoT networks. Evaluation of a developed prototype demonstrates that the proposed solution is promising to present a unified framework for IoT data security.