Can Blockchain Protect Internet-of-Things?
This addresses security challenges for IoT systems with billions of connected devices, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing technologies like blockchain and chip identification.
The paper tackles the security problem in the Internet-of-Things (IoT), where device identification and spoofing prevention are difficult, by proposing a new concept called the datachain layer that combines physical chip identification with blockchain, resulting in a method to uniquely link physical and logical addresses for protection.
In the Internet-of-Things, the number of connected devices is expected to be extremely huge, i.e., more than a couple of ten billion. It is however well-known that the security for the Internet-of-Things is still open problem. In particular, it is difficult to certify the identification of connected devices and to prevent the illegal spoofing. It is because the conventional security technologies have advanced for mainly protecting logical network and not for physical network like the Internet-of-Things. In order to protect the Internet-of-Things with advanced security technologies, we propose a new concept (datachain layer) which is a well-designed combination of physical chip identification and blockchain. With a proposed solution of the physical chip identification, the physical addresses of connected devices are uniquely connected to the logical addresses to be protected by blockchain.