Securing Event Logs with Blockchain for IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing in popularity in recent years. With the increasing use, security threats are also becoming a bigger concern, especially considering new challenges, like limited computational power, low storage capacity and unprecedented number of independent, uncoordinated hardware device manufacturers. Unfortunately, modern attacks are more and more sophisticated and some attackers may even use anti-forensics techniques to hide any evidence of their malicious activity. As a result, digital forensics will be crucial in investigating crimes committed against IoT devices. One of the challenges is to create secure, lightweight and tamper-proof event log for the IoT system. Proposed solution relies on a blockchain to store event logs, guaranteeing the integrity of data. Event logs from IoT devices are being sent to multiple servers using multiple channels of communication to ensure logs availability and to move most of computational effort from the IoT device to the server. Logs are (optionally) encrypted to provide confidentiality of stored data. A set of security and performance tests were performed to prove effectiveness of proposed solution.