Black-Box IoT: Authentication and Distributed Storage of IoT Data from Constrained Sensors

TL;DR

BBox-IoT introduces an ultra-lightweight blockchain-inspired system enabling constrained IoT devices to authenticate and store data securely without heavy cryptography or clock synchronization, suitable for industrial environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel chain-based hash signature scheme that is highly efficient and suitable for ultra-constrained IoT devices, eliminating the need for cryptographic heavy operations and clock sync.

Findings

Enables IoT devices with 16MHz microcontrollers to broadcast data securely.

Achieves 2-3 orders of magnitude faster signing and verification than ECDSA.

Increases signing operations by over 5000% for the same power budget.

Abstract

We propose Black-Box IoT (BBox-IoT), a new ultra-lightweight black-box system for authenticating and storing IoT data. BBox-IoT is tailored for deployment on IoT devices (including low-Size Weight and Power sensors) which are extremely constrained in terms of computation, storage, and power. By utilizing core Blockchain principles, we ensure that the collected data is immutable and tamper-proof while preserving data provenance and non-repudiation. To realize BBox-IoT, we designed and implemented a novel chain-based hash signature scheme which only requires hashing operations and removes all synchronicity dependencies between signer and verifier. Our approach enables low-SWaP devices to authenticate removing reliance on clock synchronization. Our evaluation results show that BBox-IoT is practical in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments: even devices equipped with 16MHz micro-controllers and 2KB memory can broadcast their collected data without requiring heavy cryptographic operations or synchronicity assumptions. Finally, when compared to industry standard ECDSA, our approach is two and three orders of magnitude faster for signing and verification operations respectively. Thus, we are able to increase the total number of signing operations by more than 5000% for the same amount of power.