IoT Registration and Authentication in Smart City Applications with Blockchain.

Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira,Ricardo Augusto Rabelo Oliveira,Carlos Frederico Marcelo Da Cunha Cavalcanti,Charles Tim Batista Garrocho,Jorge Sá Silva

doi:10.3390/s21041323

Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira, Ricardo Augusto Rabelo Oliveira + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s21041323

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Abstract

The advent of 5G will bring a massive adoption of IoT devices across our society. IoT Applications (IoT Apps) will be the primary data collection base. This scenario leads to unprecedented scalability and security challenges, with one of the first areas for these applications being Smart Cities (SC). IoT devices in new network paradigms, such as Edge Computing and Fog Computing, will collect data from urban environments, providing real-time management information. One of these challenges is ensuring that the data sent from Edge Computing are reliable. Blockchain has been a technology that has gained the spotlight in recent years, due to its robust security in fintech and cryptocurrencies. Its strong encryption and distributed and decentralized network make it potential for this challenge. Using Blockchain with IoT makes it possible for SC applications to have security information distributed, which makes it possible to shield against Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). IoT devices in an SC can have a long life, which increases the chance of having security holes caused by outdated firmware. Adding a layer of identification and verification of attributes and signature of messages coming from IoT devices by Smart Contracts can bring confidence in the content. SC Apps that extract data from legacy and outdated appliances, installed in inaccessible, unknown, and often untrusted urban environments can benefit from this work. Our work’s main contribution is the development of API Gateways to be used in IoT devices and network gateway to sign, identify, and authorize messages. For this, keys and essential characteristics of the devices previously registered in Blockchain are used. We will discuss the importance of this implementation while considering the SC and present a testbed that is composed of Blockchain Ethereum and real IoT devices. We analyze the transfer time, memory, and CPU impacts during the sending and processing of these messages. The messages are signed, identified, and validated by our API Gateways and only then collected for an IoT data management application.

Highlights

We currently live in an urgent need to develop new and disruptive security solutions capable of supporting the long-awaited mass adoption of IoT devices promoted by the arrival of 5G
We develop an API Gateway to verify the identity and authenticate sign messages received by IoT devices, using Blockchain and Smart Contracts
Blockchain API Gateway when considering the competition for sending with other devices on the network with one, five, and ten devices running the IoT Edge API Gateway

Summary

Introduction

We currently live in an urgent need to develop new and disruptive security solutions capable of supporting the long-awaited mass adoption of IoT devices promoted by the arrival of 5G This IoT device is already widely available for purchase, using API, protocols, and server infrastructure is often proprietary. A simple battery change or firmware update in some places requires difficult operational effort, sometimes being impossible or costly to complete quickly Based on this awaited scenario, it is impossible to use the security features that are provided by default; new layers and security proposals to exchange messages from outdated IoT devices and Apps are necessary. In this session, we present the leading technologies that are used in our research.

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