In this guide, you will learn how to secure the Internet of Things with blockchain technology
Smart cities are an example of a large-scale IoT implementation that exists within our technological reach.
Thanks to smart cities, our lives are becoming more productive. Cities will never experience traffic jams again thanks to connected devices and information managed by an intelligent system. Connected technology can also make cities more energy efficient through the use of various waste-identifying sensors. It didn’t materialize despite the tech sector raving about it for fifteen years.
Most deployments ignore the requirements of the hardware in favor of distributing the equipment only. Deployments have therefore failed or been ignored for a very long time.
In this article, we’ll go through an example infrastructure installation and the issues with widespread connection and device security. Blockchain is a type of decentralized ledger that can help address the security issues caused by the IoT.
IoT installations are plagued by three main problems.
The network must be secured first. 5G networks are used in certain IoT deployments to offer connectivity. With so many devices connected to these massive networks, they are extremely tempting targets for hackers. In addition, the network contains potentially sensitive data that can also be targeted by hackers.
The integration of data is the second topic. How is data from different sources related to each other? Some of this information may include personal user information such as a social security number, commercial information owned by a company, usage patterns by customers, or public information such as the current status of traffic lights.
These bits of data must communicate in some way, but this presents difficulties. These include data security, data ownership and data protection. Ownership of the data is also in doubt. For example, information about cars is collected at a traffic light, but whose data is this? Who installed the sensors to get the data – the respective car owners or the government?
Insecure IoT devices are the third and final problem. This problem is significant as a hacked device can be used to target other connected devices. Organizations need to monitor and control device interactions.
How to protect IoT implementations?
Random neural networks and decentralized ledger technologies are combined as a security mechanism to solve IoT security and enable users to authenticate and audit anonymously.
Data between two parties is first encrypted and decrypted using a random neural network in a highly secure manner. Network hijacking is a problem that the neural network fixes. Encryption of neural networks ensures that even if a hacker did manage to hijack or eavesdrop on a network, the data would be meaningless.
Second, blockchain significantly reduces the need for security. It can be used as an auditing system to handle key management, encryption, anonymization, block queries, authentication and access control. Because of its distributed voting mechanism to regulate bandwidth and power demands, blockchain can help thwart distributed denial-of-service attacks on IoT devices.
The power and computing resources available for IoT devices are limited. To achieve the best benefits, blockchain implementations should ideally be cloud-integrated. The lack of trust between IoT devices should also be addressed, as well as single points of failure and the ability to predict mobility between zones using Markov prediction models and IoT crypto tokens.
This solution provides anonymous authentication and auditing capabilities. From an infrastructure perspective, the blockchain does most of the work; However, this is intentional.
Of course, there are downsides to every implementation. The scalability in terms of computing power and physical footprint is the main downside of adopting blockchain for a key component of this project. Consider how blockchain will benefit IoT devices as you put this solution into practice.
