BLAST-IoT: BLockchain Assisted Scalable Trust in Internet of Things

• Published in: Computers & electrical engineering 2023-07, Vol.109, p.108752, Article 108752
• Main Authors: Sharma, Avani, Pilli, Emmanuel S., Mazumdar, Arka P., Jain, Anubha
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blockchain; Direct observations; IoT; Recommendations; Trust management
• ISSN: 0045-7906; 1879-0755
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2023.108752

Internet of Things (IoT) paved the way to realize ubiquitous access towards manifold services and applications by enabling connectivity between different physical devices. The devices, having heterogeneous computation power, protocol stack, or storage power, can send or receive various services by communicating through the internet. These services inevitably demand a secure and reliable network system to interchange the data or information for their impressive utilization. One proven solution to attain this objective is embedding Trust Management System (TMS) that aims to reduce risk or uncertainty associated with interacting adversary devices by capturing their dynamic behavior in the system. With TMS, devices compute and maintain trust value on the interacting devices by observing their behavior with different interaction instances. This trust information is exchanged between the devices to assess the global reputation of devices and facilitate devices’ decisions when there is a lack of direct interactions. For systems having enormous low-power devices, one crucial aspect of TMS is secure and timely dissemination, management, and storage of trust information to accurately assess devices’ dynamic behavior. Addressing this issue, we present a blockchain-assisted scalable trust model, BLAST-IoT, for IoT systems of heterogeneous devices in this paper. BLAST-IoT intends to ensure secure dissemination and storage of trust information leveraging on the functionalities provided by blockchain technology. It adopts a semi-distributed approach where direct trust information, computed by IoT end devices, is processed and stored by some high-power edge devices running public blockchain networks to handle impediments caused by power-deficient IoT devices. The effectiveness of BLAST-IoT has been evaluated through implementation and simulation-based results for trust convergence and assessment accuracy in the dynamic IoT environment. Further, the throughput performance of BLAST-IoT has been examined with an increase in network load.