Blockchain–a promising solution to internet of things: A comprehensive analysis, opportunities, challenges and future research issues

Abstract

Blockchain (BC) technology is a promising answer for providing security and ensuring protection in a distributed way. It has transformed the digital currency platform with the revolutionary crypto-currency known as Bitcoin. From a theoretical point of view, a BC is a distributed series of blocks linked with each other where every block is an immutable record of some form of data exchange occurring in a network. Recently, numerous literature reviews and research articles have been published on the combination of BC with the Internet of Things (IoT). However, they are restricted to shallow conversations of specialized possibilities, and not many of them have an exhaustive investigation of the difficulties in creating BC for IoT at implementation levels. Within this frame of reference, the BC is viewed as the important link for creating a genuinely secure, decentralized, and trustless platform designed to be used in IoT and, in this literature review, we mean to figure out an intelligent and thorough image of the present progressive research works toward this path. We begin with the security vulnerabilities presented by the different IoT layers. Then we focused on the central working principle of BC and how BC-based frameworks accomplish the feature of security, decentralization, and auditability. From that point, we focused on the security solutions to several vulnerabilities presented by the IoT with centralized architecture, accompanied by ongoing industrial advancement and academic research to comprehend these difficulties and successfully use BC to ensure a secure platform without any centralized management in IoT.