PacketChain: A Blockchain-inspired Method for Enhanced Security of Packet Communication of Highly Constrained IoT Wearable Devices
Gouri Nair · 2023
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the emerging technologies that play a central role in developing Industry 4.0. IoT has significant potential to revolutionize various industries by integrating connected devices, allowing for improved efficiency and automation. However, the widespread adoption of wearable IoT devices has also increased security concerns, particularly regarding personal data and privacy. Ensuring security for highly resource-constrained IoT devices, such as wearable devices, is paramount for our safety. Due to the device-level constraints and highly limited resources of IoT devices, traditional cyber privacy and security solutions are unsuitable for many IoT applications and systems. The concept of Blockchain, which forms the foundation of distributed ledger and cryptocurrency, is a potential candidate for enhancing the communication security of IoT. We propose PacketChain, a Blockchain-inspired method for ensuring packet transmission security for highly constrained wearable IoT devices. The proposed PacketChain method provides an additional security mechanism complementing the current cryptographic approaches and solutions used by IoT devices. PacketChain provides an application layer solution where one packet’s hash value is included in the subsequent packet, thereby, creating a chain of packets. Using PacketChain, many attacks can be quickly detected and avoided. PacketChain is designed at low complexity and overhead, and highly resource- constrained wearable IoT devices can use it. We implement the PacketChain solution and experimentally found its suitability in IoT applications. PacketChain can avoid or reduce the impact of several cyber attacks, such as packet drop, packet fake, TCP header hijack, and packet replay attacks which are major types of man-in-the-middle attacks.