Blockchain and Trust for Secure, End-User-Based and Decentralized IoT Service Provision

Abstract

Building trust relationships between different decentralized entities in the IoT ecosystem is essential. Hereof, the combination of blockchain technology and trust evaluation techniques is recently considered as an efficient measure. However, both technologies within the IoT are still facing some limitations which are addressed in this research. First, this publication reviews various blockchain-based trust approaches and depicts their strengths and limitations regarding their usage in decentralized IoT communities. Then, an optimized trust model with a multi-layer adaptive and trust-based weighting system is proposed. Additionally, different trust metric parameters and their mathematical models used for trust evaluation are presented. Moreover, this publication presents a novel approach for incentivization processes in the IoT marketplace using control loops and smart contracts. Thereby, participants are motivated to continuously improve their behavior. Finally, the proposed trust model is proved to be reliable. The experimental results conducted from different scenarios show that the presented approach provides more resiliency against various attacks than existing ones.