Scalable and secure internet of things connectivity

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) technology, which is currently considered the new growth engine of the fourth industrial revolution, affects our daily life and has been applied to various industrial fields. Studies on overcoming the limitations of scalability and stability in a centralized IoT operating environment by employing distributed blockchain technology have been actively conducted. However, the nature of IoT that ensures connectivity with multiple objects at any time and any place increases security threats. Further, it extends the influence of the cyber world into the physical domain, resulting in serious damage to human life and property. Therefore, we aim to study a method to increase the security of IoT devices and effectively extend them simultaneously. To this end, we analyze the authentication methods and limitations of traditional IoT devices and examine cases for improving IoT environments by using blockchain technology. Accordingly, we propose a framework that allows IoT devices to be securely connected and extended to other devices by automatically evaluating security using blockchain technology and the whitelist. The method proposed in this paper restricts the extension of devices vulnerable to security risks by imposing penalties and allows only devices with high security to be securely and quickly authenticated and extended without user intervention. In this study, we applied the proposed method to IoT network simulation environments and observed that the number of devices vulnerable to security was reduced by 48.5% compared with traditional IoT environments.