Blockchain-based trust establishment mechanism in the internet of multimedia things

Abstract

Through the application of powerful semiconductors and high-speed communication technologies such as 5G, large-scale or even ultra-large-scale Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) will soon appear. Secure communication and cooperation in the Multimedia Internet of Things (IoT) will thus increase, and trust between these devices is important. However, existing IoT trust mechanisms either rely on additional trusted third parties or assume that trusted devices exist between trusted domains; these assumptions are difficult to satisfy simultaneously in the IoMT context. Accordingly, this paper utilizes blockchain technology to propose a trust establishment mechanism suitable for the distributed IoMT. Highly secure and scalable trust mechanisms are established without the need to assume that a third party exists or that these CAs (Certification Authorities) are trusted. We design the IoMT node authentication and key agreement protocols across the trust domain. Our experimental results prove that our proposed method reduces the number of trust domain conversions.