Authenticating IoT Devices with Blockchain

Abstract

There has been a tremendous effort in recent years to adopt everything smartly for personal, industrial, and social use. This provides the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) more impact, potential, and wide acceptance. However, the privacy and security concerns hamper its further adoption and development; this is mainly due to its reliance on a centralized cloud, fog, intrusion detection systems, firewall, and antivirus software for data, identity processing, and secure communication. On the one hand, IoT devices’ have some authentication and authorization flaws in the heterogeneous deployment and also relatively “vulnerable” facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. If the single IoT device is compromised, the whole network becomes faulty. The challenges of security issues are increasing by the central authorities or third parties like cloud, fog, firewall, etc. To provide a cryptographic technique for both authentication and communication problems, to avoid the use of central authority we need a platform which is decentralized and cryptographically strong with immutability. The emerging blockchain technology effectively resolves the issues and provides extra novel facilities like distributed, publically viewable to strengthen security.