Abstract
The demand for the digital monitoring of environmental ecosystems is high and growing rapidly as a means of protecting the public and managing the environment. However, before data, algorithms, and models can be mobilized at scale, there are considerable concerns associated with privacy and security that can negatively affect the adoption of technology within this domain. In this paper, we propose the advancement of electronic environmental monitoring through the capability provided by the blockchain. The blockchain’s use of a distributed ledger as its underlying infrastructure is an attractive approach to counter these privacy and security issues, although its performance and ability to manage sensor data must be assessed. We focus on a new distributed ledger technology for the IoT, called IOTA, that is based on a directed acyclic graph. IOTA overcomes the current limitations of the blockchain and offers a data communication protocol called masked authenticated messaging for secure data sharing among Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We show how the application layer employing the data communication protocol, MAM, can support the secure transmission, storage, and retrieval of encrypted environmental sensor data by using an immutable distributed ledger such as that shown in IOTA. Finally, we evaluate, compare, and analyze the performance of the MAM protocol against a non-protocol approach.
Highlights
We demonstrated the potential of granular access controls, defined by the environmentalist
This study investigated the creation of an on-demand digital environmental ecosystem that relies on algorithms to analyze a huge amount of data, as well as the requirement that this data should be immutable, authenticated, and distributed
Using the masked authenticated messaging (MAM) protocol, we demonstrated how encrypted environmental sensor data can be broadcasted, stored, and fetched from the IOTA Tangle to prove the data’s integrity, security, and privacy
Summary
Human activities have an undeniable and ever-increasing impact on the climate system, along with recent developments that are unprecedented and currently acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1]. Environmental monitoring in this context refers to an Internet of Things (IoT) system where sensors are used to collect useful data about the ecosystem, leading to further discoveries and a better and more comprehensive understanding, to execute specific actions in mitigating and addressing the degradation of the environment [2]. The main difference between the IOTA and other distributed ledger technologies is that it utilizes the directed acrylic graph (DAG) structure called the “Tangle” in place of the conventional blockchain. There are three types of transactions, called tips, ongoing transactions, and approved transactions, as shown in
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