Secure device control scheme with blockchain in a smart home

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies characterizing the era of the fourth industrial revolution have enabled smart home networks to support their various systems and services. In a blockchain-based smart-home network environment, all connected IoT devices must be controlled safely and efficiently. Nevertheless, existing block-chain-based smart-home IoT systems pose a delay issue due to the necessary block generation time. In addition, IoT devices installed in smart homes should be able to prevent forgery attacks such as spoofing because they are often directly associated with personal information. In this study, we proposed an enhanced method to control smart home devices safely and efficiently by applying the zero-knowledge proof combined with a blockchain-based IoT system to protect the public keys of home network devices and the communication among them. The proposed model was approximately 10 s faster than the block generation-based model when it communicated three times in rinkeby, which is one of the test networks of Ethereum.