Secure IoT access at scale using blockchains and smart contracts
This addresses security and scalability issues for IoT systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain technologies.
The authors tackled the problem of securing large-scale IoT control systems by implementing a blockchain and smart contract-based architecture, resulting in a viable solution with significant security and usability advantages.
Blockchains and smart contracts are an emerging, promising technology, that has received considerable attention. We use the blockchain technology, and in particular Ethereum, to implement a large-scale event-based Internet of Things (IoT) control system. We argue that the distributed nature of the "ledger," as well as, Ethereum's capability of parallel execution of replicated "smart contracts", provide the sought after automation, generality, flexibility, resilience, and high availability. We design a realistic blockchain-based IoT architecture, using existing technologies while by taking into consideration the characteristics and limitations of IoT devices and applications. Furthermore, we leverage blockchain's immutability and Ethereum's support for custom tokens to build a robust and efficient token-based access control mechanism. Our evaluation shows that our solution is viable and offers significant security and usability advantages.