Internet of things-blockchain lightweight cryptography to data security and integrity for intelligent application

Abstract

The industrial internet of things (IoT) plays a major role in the growth of automation and increasing digital connectivity for machine-to-machine communication. The research community has extensively investigated the possibility of IoT and blockchain integration for the last couple of years. The major research is focused on the benefits of integrating blockchain with IoT. In this work, we first focus on the issue of integrating IoT nodes with blockchain networks, especially for non-real-time IoT nodes that do not have an in-built clock mechanism. As a result, they cannot establish communication with real-time blockchain networks. Another critical security issue is protecting data coming from IoT devices to blockchain networks. Blockchain is enough mature to protect the data in its ecosystem. However, information coming from outside of the world does not have any guarantee of data integrity and security. This paper first addresses the clock synchronization issue of IoT nodes with blockchain using a network time protocol and then proposes an IoT-blockchain light-weight cryptographic (IBLWC) approach to secure the entire IoT-blockchain ecosystem. This paper also presents the performance analysis of IBLWC as a suitable and cost-effective solution that incurs less processing overhead for IoT-blockchain-based applications.