Integrating Blockchain Technology in a Cyber Physical System to Secure Data
Béatrix-May Balaban, Sacală Ioan Ştefan, Petrescu-Niţă Alina-Claudia, Niţă Răzvan · 2023
Considering the constant growth and evolution of technology, being able to secure data is a challenge. This is why researchers find this a top research topic. Cyber-Physical Systems are complex, large-scale systems that can be found in domains like healthcare, transportation, industrial controls systems or smart grids. Having many components that interact with each other, we can observe here the challenge in maintaining a secure environment for the data as data tampering or data extraction can occur, for example, in the actual transportation of data from one device to another. The main focus of this paper is to give an answer if blockchain technology provides a solution in building a secure network. We give a short review of the related work regarding blockchain integration in large-scale systems like Cyber-Physical Systems. It was also briefly analyzed the layered structure of a blockchain and discussed some solutions for each layer. We then discussed about consensus algorithms for validation and authentication process. In general, consensus algorithms are implemented to assure the validation process of the nodes in a network. In this paper we tried to analyze and propose a model that offers an extra layer of security by adding the authentication step. In this way, the nodes that are validated are also considered trusted nodes in the network.