Blockchain, Internet of Things and Digital Twins in Trustless Security of Critical National Infrastructure

Abstract

The advent of communication technologies and smart storage gave rise to the concept of smart cities. One of the key enabling technologies of smart living is the Internet of Things (IoT). In recent years, IoT has developed into many areas of application including critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as transport, hospitals and power distribution grid. The proliferation in IoT applications raised many serious security and privacy concerns to citizens, businesses and governments. CNI systems depend heavily on IoT devices and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) to perform autonomous actions or inform human decision makers through the exchange and processing of data. Recently, blockchain has been advocated as a solution for secure data storage and sharing. Blockchain cryptographically offers a secure platform for maintaining a decentralised, ”append-only”, publicly verifiable and immutable data structure, which is timestamped and sequentially ordered by its reference to previous block hashes. The immutability and security of blockchain can improve the CNI protection. Two specific smart CNI enabling technologies that would highly benefit from blockchain are IoT and CPS. Digital twins are virtual replica of the network and logic layer of physical system. A digital twin provides a platform to solve major IoT related CNI cybersecurity challenges in tomorrow’s secure infrastructure, energy distribution, smart cities, smart manufacturing (Industrial IoT and Industry4.0) and autonomous transit systems. This key note discussion outlines how to implement blockchain as a fundamental theory for trustless security for connected CNI. It will investigate technologies which can be utilised to achieve a trustless matrix such as blockchain and peer-distributed security systems, for instance onion-routing, with the wider aim of defining trustless security further. The research also considers the feasibility of trustless IoT security systems and their application in CNI. It investigate the present state-of-the-art in cybersecurity as it relates to trustless security technologies and blockchain and what is the present state of the art of cybersecurity in IoT-enabled CNI systems.