There continues to be a recent push to taking the cryptocurrency based ledger system known as Blockchain and applying its techniques to non-financial applications. One of the main areas for application remains Internet of Things (IoT) as we see many areas of improvement as we move into an age of smart cities. In this paper, we examine an initial look at applying the key aspects of Blockchain to a health application network where patients health data can be used to create alerts important to authenticated healthcare providers in a secure and private manner. This paper also presents the benefits and also practical obstacles of the blockchain-based security approaches in IoT.
Conoscenti @cite_6 survey the blockchain and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approaches and their potential usage in a private-by-design IoT. Their investigation detects several issues in the integrity, anonymity and adaptability of blockchain systems. They conclude that large blockchain systems (e.g. Bitcoin) are secure but not appropriate for IoT due to scalability issues. Furthermore, in @cite_7 we see how blockchain can address some general IoT challenges. For example, blockchain and smart contracts can improve security in supply chain networks in IoT. Reyna @cite_3 study IoT and blockchain integration and its challenges. The survey work summarizes and discusses IoT devices that can be used as blockchain components, important blockchain technologies and recent IoT–Blockchain applications. The most IoT-Blockchain applications are based on Ethereum.
@cite_3 @cite_7 @cite_6
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In the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, the block-chain and, in general, Peer-to-Peer approaches could play an important role in the development of decentralized and dataintensive applications running on billion of devices, preserving the privacy of the users. Our research goal is to understand whether the blockchain and Peer-to-Peer approaches can be employed to foster a decentralized and private-by-design IoT. As a first step in our research process, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review on the blockchain to gather knowledge on the current uses of this technology and to document its current degree of integrity, anonymity and adaptability. We found 18 use cases of blockchain in the literature. Four of these use cases are explicitly designed for IoT. We also found some use cases that are designed for a private-by-design data management. We also found several issues in the integrity, anonymity and adaptability. Regarding anonymity, we found that in the blockchain only pseudonymity is guaranteed. Regarding adaptability and integrity, we discovered that the integrity of the blockchain largely depends on the high difficulty of the Proof-of-Work and on the large number of honest miners, but at the same time a difficult Proof-of-Work limits the adaptability. We documented and categorized the current uses of the blockchain, and provided a few recommendations for future work to address the above-mentioned issues. Since the start of Bitcoin in 2008[1], blockchain technology emerged as the next revolutionary technology. Though blockchain started off as a core technology of Bitcoin, its use cases are expanding to many other areas including finances, Internet of Things (IoT), security and such[2]. Currently, many private and public sectors are diving into the technology[3]. Aside from that, as software and hardware improve, we would see the beginning of IoT. And those IoT devices need to communicate and synchronize with each other. But in situations where more than thousands or tens of thousands of IoT devices connected, we expect that using current model of server-client may have some limitations and issues while in synchronization. So, we propose using blockchain to build IoT system. Using blockchain, we can control and configure IoT devices. We manage keys using RSA public key cryptosystems where public keys are stored in Ethereum and private keys are saved on individual devices. Specifically, we choose Ethereum as our blockchain platform because using its smart contract, we can write our own Turing-complete code to run on top of Ethereum. Thus, we can easily manage configuration of IoT devices and build key management system. Even though we can simply use account as a key management system, which most of blockchain platform supports, we decide to use Ethereum because we can manage the system in a more fine-grained way. For the proof of a concept, we use a few IoT devices instead of a full system of IoT system, which consists of thousands of IoT devices. But in our later study, we would like to build a fully scaled IoT system using blockchain. Security and privacy are huge challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, but unfortunately, the harmonization of the IoT-related standards and protocols is hardly and slowly widespread. In this paper, we propose a new framework for access control in IoT based on the blockchain technology. Our first contribution consists in providing a reference model for our proposed framework within the Objectives, Models, Architecture and Mechanism specification in IoT. In addition, we introduce FairAccess as a fully decentralized pseudonymous and privacy preserving authorization management framework that enables users to own and control their data. To implement our model, we use and adapt the blockchain into a decentralized access control manager. Unlike financial bitcoin transactions, FairAccess introduces new types of transactions that are used to grant, get, delegate, and revoke access. As a proof of concept, we establish an initial implementation with a Raspberry PI device and local blockchain. Finally, we discuss some limitations and propose further opportunities. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. There has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of Things (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. IoT devices benefit from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. The proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead significantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.