Blockchain Architecture for Securing the IoT
Rashmi Jain · 2020
Advancement in technology is a general global need. The technology Internet of Things (IoT) has an additional requirement in large industrial, commercial, and home applications. For providing security to the data generated by various devices, another novel technology can be deployed: blockchain. IoT systems currently use a centralized access control method to control the functioning of IoT systems and have major cost, security, single point of failure (SPoF) and other issues. Decentralizing the control of IoT management can address the drawbacks of this centralized approach, and one such method is blockchain technology. Various architectures of IoT applications can be designed by defining the peer entities in the blockchain, the structure of the block, a digital ledger in the transaction, cryptographic hash function, smart contracts governing the operations by different entities, consensus algorithms and so on. The transactions in the blockchain would be transparent to all the entities and would be tamper-proof, thereby securing them. Hence, we discuss these various possible architectures, their benefits, and the challenges to be met by the application of blockchain to IoT systems.