scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

Blockchain with Internet of Things: Benefits, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR: It is concluded that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A taxonomy of the security research areas in IoT/IIoT along with their corresponding solutions is designed and several open research directions relevant to the focus of this survey are identified.

476 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the main issues involved in the complex process of IoT-based investigations, particularly all legal, privacy and cloud security challenges, as well as some promising cross-cutting data reduction and forensics intelligence techniques.
Abstract: Today is the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). The recent advances in hardware and information technology have accelerated the deployment of billions of interconnected, smart and adaptive devices in critical infrastructures like health, transportation, environmental control, and home automation. Transferring data over a network without requiring any kind of human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction, brings reliability and convenience to consumers, but also opens a new world of opportunity for intruders, and introduces a whole set of unique and complicated questions to the field of Digital Forensics. Although IoT data could be a rich source of evidence, forensics professionals cope with diverse problems, starting from the huge variety of IoT devices and non-standard formats, to the multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and the resulting multi-jurisdictional litigations. A further challenge is the end-to-end encryption which represents a trade-off between users’ right to privacy and the success of the forensics investigation. Due to its volatile nature, digital evidence has to be acquired and analyzed using validated tools and techniques that ensure the maintenance of the Chain of Custody. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the main issues involved in the complex process of IoT-based investigations, particularly all legal, privacy and cloud security challenges. Furthermore, this work provides an overview of the past and current theoretical models in the digital forensics science. Special attention is paid to frameworks that aim to extract data in a privacy-preserving manner or secure the evidence integrity using decentralized blockchain-based solutions. In addition, the present paper addresses the ongoing Forensics-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm, as well as some promising cross-cutting data reduction and forensics intelligence techniques. Finally, several other research trends and open issues are presented, with emphasis on the need for proactive Forensics Readiness strategies and generally agreed-upon standards.

440 citations


Cites background from "Blockchain with Internet of Things:..."

  • ...[137] suggests that moving the Internet of Things into the decentralized path, may be the key to managing the huge number of cyber-attacks....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An in-depth survey of state-of-the-art proposals having 5G-enabled IoT as a backbone for blockchain-based industrial automation for the applications such as-Smart city, Smart Home, Healthcare 4.0, Smart Agriculture, Autonomous vehicles and Supply chain management is presented.

366 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The findings suggest that blockchain technology together with advanced information and communication technology and internet of things have been adopted for the improvement of agri-food value chain management in four main aspects: traceability, information security, manufacturing and sustainable water management.

348 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The exploration revealed that due to the exponential uses of blockchain, investments involved, and a number of start-up businesses contributing to Industry 4.0, blockchain indeed has a credible potential in the construction industry.

236 citations

References
More filters
15 Jan 2020

4,407 citations


"Blockchain with Internet of Things:..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...This was by releasing the popular paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” [18]....

    [...]

  • ...This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse [17,18]....

    [...]

  • ...[18] S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Www.Bitcoin.Org, p. 9, 2008....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
Abstract: Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around blockchains, we examine whether they make a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts—scripts that reside on the blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing, time-consuming workflows. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.

3,129 citations


"Blockchain with Internet of Things:..." refers background in this paper

  • ...The total amount of communications that will have to be handled when there are tens of billions of IoT devices will increase those costs substantially [30]....

    [...]

01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: The phrase "Internet of Things" started life as the title of a presentation I made at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999 as mentioned in this paper, which was more than just a good way to get executive attention.
Abstract: Jun 22, 2009—I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure the phrase "Internet of Things" started life as the title of a presentation I made at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999. Linking the new idea of RFID in P&G's supply chain to the then-red-hot topic of the Internet was more than just a good way to get executive attention. It summed up an important insight—one that 10 years later, after the Internet of Things has become the title of everything from an article in Scientific American to the name of a European Union conference, is still often misunderstood.

2,608 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
13 Mar 2017
TL;DR: This paper shows that the proposed BC-based smart home framework is secure by thoroughly analysing its security with respect to the fundamental security goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and presents simulation results to highlight that the overheads are insignificant relative to its security and privacy gains.
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) security and privacy remain a major challenge, mainly due to the massive scale and distributed nature of IoT networks. Blockchain-based approaches provide decentralized security and privacy, yet they involve significant energy, delay, and computational overhead that is not suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices. In our previous work, we presented a lightweight instantiation of a BC particularly geared for use in IoT by eliminating the Proof of Work (POW) and the concept of coins. Our approach was exemplified in a smart home setting and consists of three main tiers namely: cloud storage, overlay, and smart home. In this paper we delve deeper and outline the various core components and functions of the smart home tier. Each smart home is equipped with an always online, high resource device, known as “miner” that is responsible for handling all communication within and external to the home. The miner also preserves a private and secure BC, used for controlling and auditing communications. We show that our proposed BC-based smart home framework is secure by thoroughly analysing its security with respect to the fundamental security goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, we present simulation results to highlight that the overheads (in terms of traffic, processing time and energy consumption) introduced by our approach are insignificant relative to its security and privacy gains.

1,340 citations


"Blockchain with Internet of Things:..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...This model was used to connect a wide range of computing devices for many years and will continue to support small-scale IoT networks, however, it will not be capable of providing the needs to extend the IoT system in the future [22]....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: This work proposes using blockchain to build IoT system, which can control and configure IoT devices and build key management system, and chooses Ethereum because it can manage the system in a more fine-grained way.
Abstract: Since the start of Bitcoin in 2008[1], blockchain technology emerged as the next revolutionary technology. Though blockchain started off as a core technology of Bitcoin, its use cases are expanding to many other areas including finances, Internet of Things (IoT), security and such[2]. Currently, many private and public sectors are diving into the technology[3]. Aside from that, as software and hardware improve, we would see the beginning of IoT. And those IoT devices need to communicate and synchronize with each other. But in situations where more than thousands or tens of thousands of IoT devices connected, we expect that using current model of server-client may have some limitations and issues while in synchronization. So, we propose using blockchain to build IoT system. Using blockchain, we can control and configure IoT devices. We manage keys using RSA public key cryptosystems where public keys are stored in Ethereum and private keys are saved on individual devices. Specifically, we choose Ethereum as our blockchain platform because using its smart contract, we can write our own Turing-complete code to run on top of Ethereum. Thus, we can easily manage configuration of IoT devices and build key management system. Even though we can simply use account as a key management system, which most of blockchain platform supports, we decide to use Ethereum because we can manage the system in a more fine-grained way. For the proof of a concept, we use a few IoT devices instead of a full system of IoT system, which consists of thousands of IoT devices. But in our later study, we would like to build a fully scaled IoT system using blockchain.

735 citations