Blockchain Technology: Introduction, Integration and Security Issues with IoT

TL;DR

This paper introduces blockchain technology, explaining its fundamental concepts, categories, and mechanisms, and discusses its potential to enhance security in IoT devices through applications and integration strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain components, categories, and consensus mechanisms, and explores its application in securing IoT devices, highlighting practical use cases.

Findings

Blockchain enhances IoT security effectively.

Distributed blockchain offers advantages over centralized databases.

Practical applications demonstrate blockchain's role in IoT security.

Abstract

Blockchain was mainly introduced for secure transactions in connection with the mining of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. This article discusses the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology and its components, such as block header, transaction, smart contracts, etc. Blockchain uses the distributed databases, so this article also explains the advantages of distributed Blockchain over a centrally located database. Depending on the application, Blockchain is broadly categorized into two categories; Permissionless and Permissioned. This article elaborates on these two categories as well. Further, it covers the consensus mechanism and its working along with an overview of the Ethereum platform. Blockchain technology has been proved to be one of the remarkable techniques to provide security to IoT devices. An illustration of how Blockchain will be useful for IoT devices has been given. A few applications are also illustrated to explain the working of Blockchain with IoT.