A Trust and Reputation System for IoT Exploiting Distributed Ledger Technology
This addresses the need for a robust TRS in IoT, particularly for new business models like Sensor-as-a-Service, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Tangle and Blockchain technologies.
The paper tackles the lack of scalability in current Blockchain technologies for IoT applications by introducing a distributed ledger combining Tangle and Blockchain as a Trust and Reputation System (TRS) framework, which can handle large numbers of IoT device transactions and facilitates low power nodes joining while mitigating threats like whitewashing attacks.
The advent of Bitcoin, and consequently Blockchain, has ushered in a new era of decentralization. Blockchain enables mutually distrusting entities to work collaboratively to attain a common objective. However, current Blockchain technologies lack scalability, which limits their use in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Many devices on the Internet have the computational and communication capabilities to facilitate decision-making. These devices will soon be a 50 billion node network. Furthermore, new IoT business models such as Sensor-as-a-Service (SaaS) require a robust Trust and Reputation System (TRS). In this paper, we introduce an innovative distributed ledger combining Tangle and Blockchain as a TRS framework for IoT. The combination of Tangle and Blockchain provides maintainability of the former and scalability of the latter. The proposed ledger can handle large numbers of IoT device transactions and facilitates low power nodes joining and contributing. Employing a distributed ledger mitigates many threats, such as whitewashing attacks. Along with combining payments and rating protocols, the proposed approach provides cleaner data to the upper layer reputation algorithm.