Reliable Logging in Wireless IoT Networks in the Presence of Byzantine Faults

Abstract

Wireless IoT networks are becoming increasingly prevalent for sensing and actuating in a range of sophisticated applications, such as smart homes and smart cities. For various reasons, including auditability, debugging and performance tracking, event logging is essential in such networks. However, most current research has assumed that nodes always behave correctly. Yet, nodes in open IoT networks may misbehave due to the presence of attackers. Hence, an understanding of the problem of event logging in the presence of Byzantine nodes is essential. In this paper, we propose two versions of event logging: strong and weak logging. We show a number of impossibility results and propose a distributed and centralised version of the weak event logging. We show that only a weak logging can be achieved probabilistically, and we propose, and prove correct, an algorithm to solve the problem.