On the Security of Permissioned Blockchain Solutions for IoT Applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates permissioned blockchain consensus protocols for IoT, highlighting their performance and fault tolerance to address IoT-specific constraints and requirements.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of various permissioned blockchain consensus protocols tailored for IoT applications, focusing on performance and security.

Findings

Consensus protocols vary significantly in throughput and latency.

Some protocols demonstrate higher fault tolerance suitable for IoT.

Performance insights guide protocol selection for IoT security needs.

Abstract

The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures having been proposed for improving not only security but also properties like transparency and auditability. However, many blockchain solutions suffer from inherent constraints associated with the consensus protocol used. These constraints are mostly inherited by the permissionless setting, e.g. computational power in proof-of-work, and become serious obstacles in a resource-constrained IoT environment. Moreover, consensus protocols with low throughput or high latency are not suitable for IoT networks where massive volumes of data are generated. Thus, in this paper we focus on permissioned blockchain platforms and investigate the consensus protocols used, aiming at evaluating their performance and fault tolerance as the main selection criteria for (in principle highly insecure) IoT ecosystem. The results of the paper provide new insights on the essential differences of various consensus protocols and their capacity to meet IoT needs.