STATE-OF-THE-ART, CHALLENGES AND OPEN ISSUES IN INTEGRATION OF BLOCK CHAIN AND IOT
CA Vinod Sharma · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020
Block chain is the most promising technology for Internet of value that provides anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency to all its users. A block chain is a tamper-evident, shared digital ledger that records transactions in a public or private peer-to-peer network distributed to all member nodes in the network. Block chain permanently records all the transactions in a sequential chain of cryptographic hash-linked blocks, with the history of asset exchanges that took place between the peers in the network. Today block chain is one of the widely discussed and crucially analysed subjects. It is a promising technology breakthrough that in short run can largely help in reducing the costs but in the long run it has the potential of creating trans-formative business models by digitizing trust and agreements. The other technology that has revolutionized the Internet is the Internet of Things (IoT) –a technology that can connect nearly all the devices over the Internet for creating innovative services and applications by sharing and communicating their data. IoT with so many benefits also raises several security challenges that can be resolved by integrating IoT with block chain technology. This chapter provides a synopsis of technical characteristics of the block chain and IoT by reviewing block chain technology, its applications and challenges followed by review of the IoT system’s security and privacy issues. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the integration challenges and issues of Block chain and IoT technologies by unfolding default limitations of Block chain such as network expansion, lack of IoT-centric transaction validation rules and the absence of IoT-focused consensus protocols, insecure device integration that needs to be addressed before it can be used securely and efficiently in an IoT environment.