Implementation of Ethereum Accounts and Transactions on Embedded IoT Devices

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal architecture enabling resource-constrained IoT devices to perform data certification and notarization directly on the Ethereum blockchain, demonstrating feasibility through benchmarks on ARM Cortex-M4 hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight hardware-software platform allowing IoT devices to securely produce signed blockchain transactions with minimal computational load.

Findings

Transactions can be sent with low latency on ARM Cortex-M4 hardware.

IoT devices can directly interact with Ethereum blockchain without bottlenecks.

The approach ensures data integrity and authenticity for IoT data.

Abstract

The growing interest in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) poses the challenge of finding robust solutions for the certification and notarization of data produced and collected by embedded devices. The blockchain and distributed ledger technologies represent a promising solution to address these issues, but rise other questions, for example regarding their practical feasibility. In fact, IoT devices have limited resources and, consequently, may not be able to easily perform all the operations required to participate in a blockchain. In this paper we propose a minimal architecture to allow IoT devices performing data certification and notarization on the Ethereum blockchain. We develop a hardware-software platform through which a lightweight device (e.g., an IoT sensor), holding a secret key and the associated public address, produces signed transactions, which are then submitted to the blockchain network. This guarantees data integrity and authenticity and, on the other hand, minimizes the computational burden on the lightweight device. To show the practicality of the proposed approach, we report and discuss the results of benchmarks performed on ARM Cortex-M4 hardware architectures, sending transactions over the Ropsten testnet. Our results show that all the necessary operations can be performed with small latency, thus proving that an IoT device can directly interact with the blockchain, without apparent bottlenecks.