2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan.

22-24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

Blockchain based Security System for the Devices in

Internet of Things
[Link]/ Assistant Professor [Link]/Professor
Dept of IT, Nandha College of Technology, Dept of CSE, Nandha College of Technology,
Erode-638052, Tamil Nadu, India Erode-638052, Tamil Nadu, India
Email: - sureshkumartt@[Link] Email: - tovijayakumar@[Link]

Abstract – Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of the The major role of the IoT based system is to share the
devices which are capable of receiving the data from the data which may be related with the human or the data related
environment and communicating through the internet. to the manufacturing, transportation and other privacy
The IoT devices generate a significant amount of sensitive sensitive data. The IoT devices are designed to be the light
information which may be prone to the several security weight modules and the memory capacity of such devices are
attacks. The evolution of the IoT demands a high degree of also low and these devices are used from the smallest
security in terms of confidentiality, integrity, reliability wearable to the massive vehicles.
and other factors. Because of the hardware restrictions,
the security mechanisms used for the normal networks IoT consists of the devices which are capable of
cannot be applied. For such reasons, instead of a generating, processing and communicating large amounts of
centralized approach, the distributed record based the important data and such data are to be maintained securely
technique called the blockchain (BC) approach is used. and it may be prone to the several threats and attacks. As the
This produces better results in terms of security IoT devices are small and less energy efficient, their energy is
consideration such as security, privacy etc. when mostly utilized for the communication and the task of adopting
compared with the existing security mechanisms. the security and privacy is difficult. The traditional method of
the security is not well suited for the IoT system and also the
Keywords - Internet of Things, blockchain, security, privacy. centralized security systems are also not suited for the IoT
system because of the many of the constraints. As a
I. INTRODUCTION consequence of this, IoT demands for a distributed and
A. Internet of Things (IoT) scalable privacy system.
The Internet of Things is a connected system of the
devices which are capable of receiving the data from the B. Security in IoT
environment. Such devices are equipped with sensors and Security for the IoT system is considered as the very
actuators. The IoT devices are becoming popular in the human crucial because of many of the critical circumstances such as
life in various forms such as the wearable which can track the the low and constrained computational, memory, power and
health conditions of the humans. In such cases the data may the management of the end devices and the physical location
prone to the security attack in the device itself or in the of those devices. The continuous growth of IoT applications
communication system which uses the internet. IoT can also has been increasing the volume of the data and also it
be applied in the other fields such as the smart factories and produces an increased demand for the security services such as
the smart cities where the data is collected in the the data secrecy, reliability and authentication.
manufacturing location in case of the factories or the data The effort to use security mechanisms that are typical
about the traffic and other details are collected in case of the of common networks may cause adverse effects due to the
smart cities and such data are transmitted through the cloud hardware related resource restrictions. The primary overheads
for the delivery of the intelligent functionalities. In such cases are related to energy consumption and increase of
also the privacy plays a major role and is to be provided with communication delays. Another consideration is that the
the proper security systems. higher memory consumption in the device’s limited memory
and affects the applications running on it. Consequently, the
main challenges for implementing security mechanisms over

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22-24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

IoT are to reduce the conflict between resource utilization and use as a security system for a variety of applications involving
also the preferred security. The security risks of IoT are personal data as in the smart devices, financial transactions
exacerbated by the shortage of elementary security safeguards etc.,
in several of the lower generation IoT devices in the market.
A lot of the security attacks and vulnerabilities are III. RELATED WORKS
identified in the associated devices ranging from smart
wearable to transportation systems. Several fundamental F. Y. Ren et al.[7] proposed a security frame work called as
features of IoT enlarge its security and privacy challenges RSN (RFID Sensor Network) which includes both the RFID
including: lack of central control, heterogeneity in device and WSN security and it is used to solve the problems caused
resources, multiple attack surfaces, context-aware and by the heterogeneous nature of the data in the IoT networks.
situational nature of risks, and scale. Naturally, security and Tahir et al. [8] proposed a Integrated Circuit based security
privacy for IoT is receiving a lot of concentration within the framework called ICMetric for the IoT which uses the
research community. mathematical and the statistical features of the devices and are
II. BLOCKCHAIN BASED SECURITY MODEL combined to characterize the electronic devices and it prevents
key theft and device cloning problems in the IoT networks.
A Blockchain is a peer-peer decentralized frame work by Liu et al. [9] proposed a security system for IoT based on
which the copies of the data structure are shared among the the principles of the biological immune system. A circular
entities of the network. It was initially developed to avoid the defense strategy is proposed and the biological human behavior
double spending problem [4] in the crypto-currency named is applied. The authors also simulated the system for the real
Bitcoin [3] and the transactions can be carried out without the IoT environment. Zhou and Chao [10] proposed a security
intermediaries. In this system the mutually agreed transactions framework for the media aware traffic security which focuses
are carried out by the usage of the block chain which uses an on the challenges of the multimedia systems in IoT network.
authorized ledger of the transactions [5].Blockchain is based on
the log of the records that are grouped into blocks. Each block Rose [11] proposed a security framework based on the
will be consisting of the cryptographic hash and the physical un-clonable functions. The idea behind this is that it
information such as the timestamp, the financial data and the used the nano technology can be used for implementing
data about the person involved in the transactions and each security mechanisms in the resource limited IoT devices and it
block will have reference to the hash of the previous blocks and has prospective to provide security features such as
it forms a link between the various blocks called as the chain of authentication and key generation. Lessa dos Santos et al. [12]
blocks or the blockchain. In the block chain network there is no proposed a security architecture based on the Transport Layer
trusted intermediary to maintain the database for the non Security and also with the authentication for communication
trusting entities of the network [6]. between the devices and the security architecture is based on
the third party devices called as the Security Support Providers.
In order to prevent the issues of the distributed environment
and also to reach a common global view of the network called Kothmayr et al. [13] also proposed a security framework
as consensus, a set of rules are to be followed by the database based on the usage of the dedicated hardware and it uses the
transactions. These rules are programmed into the entities of trusted modules with the devices and the modules use the RSA
the network and the clients can decide whether the incoming cryptographic technique to provide the security features. Xin
transactions are valid. As the block chain records are crypto- [14] proposed a security framework based on the hybrid key
graphed by the hash function and it acts like the digital technology which uses the symmetric and asymmetric key and
signature, and whenever a record is altered the digital signature the combined mechanism can provide better security features
becomes invalid and the other entities of the network will know for the data communication over the IoT networks.
about the alterations. For the hackers, the block chain records Leo et al. [15] proposed a security architecture called as the
are distributed across the peer entities of the network and there Secure Mediation GateWay (SMGW) for the secured
is no single point of failure, the attack cannot be made on the communication. In [15], the SMGW takes care of all the
single computer and has to compromise more than half the security features including the accounts management and the
number of entities in the network to get the hash function. secure remote access. D. Zegzhda and T. Stepanova [16]
Because of the distributed nature and the redundancy of the proposed a security framework based on the theory of
data storage across all the entities of the network the security topological sustainability and it helps to prevent a large class of
attacks are highly impossible and this makes the block chain to DoS attacks. Raza et al. [17] proposed a security framework for

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22-24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

the IoT networks called as the Scalable Security with privacy principles for the data transmission. The integration of
Symmetric Keys (S3K) which is suitable for the resource the blockchain protocols varies for the different applications
limited IoT devices. and there are protocols which use the hashing principles that
are to be broadcasted in the network and there are also
IV. METHODOLOGY
applications which need to be provide the hashing functions in
The network used in the IoT system can be layered into peer to peer basis. The solution to solve this issue of multiple
four layers (Fig.1) and the security principles can be applied on applications is to provide the multiple blockchains in this layer
these different layers. for providing application specific functionalities.

A) Physical Layer: C) Database Layer:

The IoT Devices are the sensors and the actuators which are The database layer is the most important and it need to be
used in the physical environment of the IoT system and these provide with the proper security principles. By using the
are capable of communicating with the uppermost layers. The blockchain decentralized database is maintained that stores the
physical layer devices such as the temperature sensors, records which consist of the cryptographic hash function,
humidity sensors etc., are prone to security attacks due to the timestamp and other details. The records are stored in the form
poor encryption and access control mechanisms. Also there is of links between one another in the form of a chain. The
also lack of a standards for the smart devices for the controlling database can be used in two forms public and private. The
these devices and to provide security, the vendors must provide public database is more transparent and it is prone to the
a standard which is agreed by all of them for the purpose of security attacks. The private database also consumes more time
implementation and communication in the smart devices to reach the consensus when compared with that of the private
database. As a consequence of this, a private database is to be
Application maintained for providing the security features such as
(Smart Applications) confidentiality, privacy, reliability etc., for the real-time IoT
applications.
D) Application Layer:
Database Layer
(Public and Private Databases) This layer consists of a variety of the smart applications
which needs to cooperate with each other to make the valuable
decisions. There are applications which fetch the location
related information and other sensitive data and transfer the
Communication Layer received data to the other applications. As a result of this, there
(Networking Protocols) are possibilities for the security attacks through the other
applications and the integration of the applications is to be
done carefully.
Physical Layer V. CONCLUSION
(Sensors and Actuators)
This paper proposes a blockchain based security framework
for the IoT networks to provide the secured data
Fig. 1. Layers in IoT networks communication. The major benefits of using the blockchain are
that it is resilient against many of the security threats. It also
B) Communication Layer:
provides a number of security features such as improved
This layer is responsible for the purpose of the data consistency, better fault tolerance capabilities, high efficiency,
communication between the physical layer and the upper layer. and improved scalability. Therefore the incorporation of
This layer uses different communication mechanisms for the blockchain technology with the IoT networks devices will
data exchange between the systems of the IoT network. The create a widespread platform where all the devices would be
communication mechanisms are like the Bluetooth in case of able to exchange data securely in a distributed network.
the small networks, wired connections such as the Ethernet,
Cellular Networks such as 4G etc., and it varies for the
different applications. The blockchain protocols are to be
integrated with this layer in order to provide the security and

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22-24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

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