Abstract
Billions of IoT devices and smart objects are already in operation today and even more are expected to be on the network over time. These IoT devices will generate enormous amounts of data that cannot be allowed to transmit on the network without end-to-end encryption or any trust and security mechanism. Currently, we have certificate authorities that certify the identity of a network device by binding its identity with its public key. However, these certificate authorities are centralized in structure and will not be able to individually certify billions of IoT devices entirely. In this paper, we propose that in an SDN-based IoT network, the identities, i.e., public keys and trust indices of IoT devices, can be stored on a blockchain to ensure immutability and tamper-resistance. The paper presents a novel scalable solution for key and trust management of IoT devices in IoT networks, with a successful proof-of-concept that proves the scalability of the proposed solution. The combination of an IoT network along with blockchain technology and software-defined networking (SDN) is effectively demonstrated through simulation that is able to store the public keys of IoT devices on the blockchain and route the network traffic efficiently through SDN. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of throughput and access time delay. The results illustrate that access delay and throughput were not affected linearly or exponentially and the proposed solution shows no significant degradation in the performance with the increase in the number of IoT nodes and packets.
Highlights
U SER authentication and identity management have always posed a challenge in traditional internet infrastructure
This paper proposes a solution that focuses on the registration process of the IoT devices, secured and trusted communication between them and providing feedback on other IoT devices based on their communication experience
The IoT devices expose their public key to the softwaredefined networking (SDN) controller and SDN controller is able to use its private key to sign the identity of IoT device bound by its public key and publish it on the blockchain
Summary
U SER authentication and identity management have always posed a challenge in traditional internet infrastructure. There is a compelling need for highly scalable, distributed third-party services that establish the required level of trust between communicating IoT devices. The major advantage of incorporating blockchain technology is that it eliminates the need for any centralized third-party authority to validate pieces of information [1]. Such elimination is crucial, because the CA hierarchies of today’s PKIs are prone to show bottlenecks and single points of failure. A limitation of SDN controllers-based infrastructures is that they are by design centralized for better control, management and monitoring of network components. The combination of SDN with IoT and blockchain allows the network to be managed centrally along with configurable functionalities. The control and configurable nature of SDN makes it applicable to various network topologies [3]
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