Sliding Window Blockchain Architecture for Internet of Things

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal 2020-04, Vol.7 (4), p.3338-3348
• Main Authors: Koshy, Prescilla, Babu, Sarath, Manoj, B. S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blockchain; Computer architecture; Computer memory; Cryptography; Data transmission; Energy sources; Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); Organizations; Security; Sensors; Sliding; sliding window; Smart buildings; smart home; Smart homes
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.2967119

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the concept of enabling Internet connectivity and associated services to nontraditional computers formed by integrating essential computing and communication capability to physical things for everyday usage. Security and privacy are two of the major challenges in IoT. The essential security requirements of IoT cannot be ensured by the existing security frameworks due to the constraints in CPU, memory, and energy resources of the IoT devices. Also, the centralized security architectures are not suitable for IoT because they are subjected to single point of attacks. Defending against targeted attacks on centralized resources is expensive. Therefore, the security architecture for IoT needs to be decentralized and designed to meet the limitations in resources. Blockchain is a decentralized security framework suitable for a variety of applications. However, blockchain in its original form is not suitable for IoT, due to its high-computational complexity and low scalability. In this article, we propose a sliding window blockchain (SWBC) architecture that modifies the traditional blockchain architecture to suit IoT applications. The proposed SWBC uses previous (n-1) blocks to form the next block hash with limited difficulty in proof-of-work (PoW). The performance of SWBC is analyzed on a real-time data stream generated from a smart home testbed. The results show that the proposed blockchain architecture increases security and minimizes memory overhead while consuming fewer resources.