Blockchain Technology for Privacy and Security Issues and Challenges in IOT-Based Systems
C.J. Raman, S. Usha Kiruthika, L. Javid Ali, S. Kanaga Suba Raja · Auerbach Publications eBooks · 2021
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has, to a great extent, changed the day-to-day activities of the contemporary world. The traits of IoT such as connectivity, sensing and lively commitment have made it an inevitable technology to reckon with. Technological evolution in the field of the wireless sensor network supports the sensors and actuators to connect to the endpoints via the Internet gateways, forming a unified network. Devices present in such a network share the information by utilizing the Internet without any hitches. Based on the information exchanged, the endpoint systems may initiate appropriate actions, which may vary depending upon the context of the application domain. The majority of IoT devices have inherent restrictions with respect to computation, storage and network scalability, making them more vulnerable to various attacks. They can be easily negotiated and slashed. Data transferred between the devices should be secure. Security lapses during data transfer may result in data tampering, data theft and attacks on the entire network. Privacy refers to safeguarding the information of the devices from being exposed onto the network. Each and every device connected to the network is provided with a unique identifier which will be utilized during data transfer. Whenever the patchy data from multiple devices are collected and analyzed, it can result in the exposure of the critical data. Device spoofing, masquerade attack, dishonest authentication and lack of trustworthiness in data exchange are among the most noticeable obstacles in the IoT network. Hence it becomes necessary to overcome the above-mentioned technical hitches with the utmost care. A technique based on the dissemination and replication of the digital record of the exchanged information known as Blockchain addresses these issues. A Blockchain is a distributed database which records all the managed transactions in the order of their occurrence in a format that is not easy for any adversary to tamper with. Blockchain consists of three essential notions, namely blocks, nodes and miners. Miners construct the fresh blocks and each block comprises of three entities, namely data, nonce and hash. The devices in the network form the nodes. Every active node present in the network maintains a copy of the Blockchain. All the active nodes of the network share the saved ledger, which is computationally very much impossible to tamper. For a freshly mined block to be included into the chain, it should be approved algorithmically by the network. By incorporating the framework offered by Blockchain into the IoT-based systems, the security and privacy issues are all addressed with ease.