Schloss: Blockchain-Based System Architecture for Secure Industrial IoT

Abstract

Industrial companies can use blockchain to assist them in resolving their trust and security issues. In this research, we provide a fully distributed blockchain-based architecture for industrial IoT, relying on trust management and reputation to enhance nodes’ trustworthiness. The purpose of this contribution is to introduce our system architecture to show how to secure network access for users with dynamic authorization management. All decisions in the system are made by trustful nodes’ consensus and are fully distributed. The remarkable feature of this system architecture is that the influence of the nodes’ power is lowered depending on their Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), and the nodes’ significance and authority is determined by their behavior in the network. This impact is based on game theory and an incentive mechanism for reputation between nodes. This system design can be used on legacy machines, which means that security and distributed systems can be put in place at a low cost on industrial systems. While there are no numerical results yet, this work, based on the open questions regarding the majority problem and the proposed solutions based on a game-theoretic mechanism and a trust management system, points to what and how industrial IoT and existing blockchain frameworks that are focusing only on the power of PoW and PoS can be secured more effectively.