Blockchain and its Role in the Internet of Things (IoT)

TL;DR

This paper explores how blockchain technology can enhance security and traceability in IoT networks, discussing its potential benefits, challenges, and the role it can play in secure IoT communication.

Contribution

It provides an overview of blockchain's application in IoT, highlighting opportunities and challenges, and discusses its potential to improve security and data integrity in IoT systems.

Findings

Blockchain can secure IoT data transactions.

Blockchain enables traceability and authentication in IoT.

Challenges include scalability and resource constraints.

Abstract

Blockchain (BC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technology that acts with decentralized, distributed, public and real-time ledger to store transactions among IoT nodes. A blockchain is a series of blocks, each block is linked to its previous blocks. Every block has the cryptographic hash code, previous block hash, and its data. The transactions in BC are the basic units that are used to transfer data between IoT nodes. The IoT nodes are different kind of physical but smart devices with embedded sensors, actuators, programs and able to communicate with other IoT nodes. The role of BC in IoT is to provide a procedure to process secured records of data through IoT nodes. BC is a secured technology that can be used publicly and openly. IoT requires this kind of technology to allow secure communication among IoT nodes in heterogeneous environment. The transactions in BC could be traced and explored through anyone who are authenticated to communicate within the IoT. The BC in IoT may help to improve the communication security. In this paper, I explored this approach, its opportunities and challenges.