Leveraging Blockchain and SDN for Efficient and Secure IoT Network

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Since the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), we are witnessing a massive growth in the development and usage of IoT enabled devices. These devices are of great importance in our day-to-day life. Many real-world applications, like smart cities, smart homes, smart wearables, connected cars, smart health, etc., are using IoT as the underlying technology. IoT devices generate a massive data for further analysis and decision-making. However, IoT devices and generated data are vulnerable to various security issues, broadly categorized as software attacks, network attacks, encryption attacks, and physical device attacks. Therefore, it is important to guard data and the IoT devices against these security, efficiency, and robustness issues. To address these IoT networks’ challenges, we can utilize two emerging technologies—Blockchain and SDN as a sustainable solution. Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized collection of validated, verified, and permanent transaction records across a large peer-to-peer (P2P) network. These transaction records are considered as blocks and other peers verify the blocks before adding it to a previous chain. Further, it applies various public/private key-based cryptographic schemes. Therefore, it is almost impossible for an attacker to change the data once it is added to a blockchain. Further, its distributed and decentralized nature avoids a centralized attack or failure. This security feature of blockchain can quickly be adopted for securing data over an IoT network. Additionally, Software-Defined Network (SDN) also offers a broad set of services to enable security in the IoT network. As SDN decouples the data plane and the control plane, it offers logically centralized control management of underlying network devices. Using this centralized control and management, we can quickly identify a security attack as early as it occurs and instruct the underlying network devices to block it by specifying dynamic flows. In this chapter, we initially aim to provide an insight into the possible security attacks in an IoT network. We also present a brief overview of blockchain and SDN technologies. Further, we discuss different blockchain and SDN-based frameworks available for creating a secure IoT network.