A Secure Model of IoT with Blockchain
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of ever-increasing complexity; it’s the next wave of innovation that will humanize every object in our life, and it is the next level of automation for every object we use. IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. To understand the scale of interest in the internet of things (IoT) just check how many conferences, articles, and studies conducted about IoT recently, this interest has hit fever pitch point in 2016 as many companies see big opportunity and believe that IoT holds the promise to expand and improve businesses processes and accelerate growth. However, the rapid evolution of the IoT market has caused an explosion in the number and variety of IoT solutions, which created real challenges as the industry evolves, mainly, the urgent need for a secure IoT model to perform common tasks such as sensing, processing, storage, and communicating. Developing that model will never be an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, there are many hurdles and challenges facing a real secure IoT model.
There are many views of IoT, from “system view” which divided IoT into blocks namely; Things, Gateways, Network Services, and Cloud Services, to “business view” of IoT consists of; Platform, Connectivity, Business Model and Applications. Regardless of the how we describe IoT, there is one common thread among all views which is “security is paramount”.
Prime example of how urgent is the need for security is the massive distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that crippled the servers of popular services like Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal across the U.S. on October 21st, 2016. It’s the result of a massive assault that involved millions of internet addresses and malicious software. One source of the traffic for the attacks was IoT devices infected by the Mirai malware which is a simple program available online. The attack comes amid heightened cybersecurity fears and a rising number of internet security breaches. In this attack, countless Internet of Things (IoT) devices that power everyday technology like closed-circuit cameras and smart-home devices were hijacked by the malware and used against the servers.
The biggest challenge facing IoT security is coming from the very architecture of the current IoT ecosystem; it’s all based on a centralized model known as the server/client model. All devices are identified, authenticated and connected through cloud servers that support huge processing and storage capacities. The connection between devices will have to go through the cloud, even if they happen to be a few feet apart. While this model has connected computing devices for decades and will continue to support today IoT networks, it will not be able to respond to the growing needs of the huge IoT ecosystems of tomorrow. Read more…