Blockchain for the Internet of Things: Present and Future

TL;DR

This paper reviews how blockchain technology can address IoT security and privacy challenges, discusses current research, and outlines future research directions to adapt blockchain for IoT's resource constraints.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain applications in IoT and proposes a research roadmap for overcoming technical challenges.

Findings

Blockchain can enhance IoT security and privacy.

Current blockchain algorithms need adaptation for IoT constraints.

Research challenges include energy efficiency and scalability.

Abstract

One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research efforts still need to be put forth to adapt the computation-intensive blockchain algorithms to the stringent energy and processing constraints of today's IoT devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing literature on the topic of blockchain for IoT, and present a roadmap of research challenges that will need to be addressed to enable the usage of blockchain technologies in the IoT.