On coexistence of decentralized system (blockchain) and central management in Internet-of-Things

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid IoT network architecture combining blockchain-based decentralization with central management, enhancing security and trust through memory chip-linked nodes and Merkle trees.

Contribution

It introduces a novel protocol integrating memory chips with blockchain and central management to improve IoT security and trust.

Findings

Memory chip-linked nodes enhance root-of-trust.

Merkle trees of memory chips enable secure transaction chaining.

Coexistence of blockchain and central management improves security.

Abstract

Networks are composed of logical nodes and edges for communications. The atomistic component of things connected to the network is a memory chip. Accordingly, the unique linkage of a memory chip and a logical node can be promising to resolve the root-of-trust problem on the Internet-of-Things. For this aim, we propose a protocol of challenge-response using a memory chip. For the central management, a central node controls the entry of electronic appliances with a memory chip into the network, and excludes a fake node (e.g., the spoofing entity) from the network that the central node manages. For the decentralized communications, Merkle's tree turns out to be composed of memory chips to which the logical nodes are uniquely linked, respectively. The root of Merkle turns out to be the memory chip that stores the latest record of data transactions. We can register this memory chip as a new block by satisfying the requirement of the proof-of-consensus. After blocks are chained, it gets harder for even the central node to manipulate transaction record among memory chips. By this way, the decentralized system (e.g., blockchain) and the central management can coexist. A new idea of security state is also discussed briefly.