Blockchain-Based Secure Time Protection Scheme in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed rapidly to make our life easier. In many IoT applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, etc.), all the IoT devices should be synchronized in time. However, some malicious nodes located in the IoT network can influence the time synchronization, which may...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE internet of things journal 2019-06, Vol.6 (3), p.4671-4679
Main Authors: Fan, Kai, Wang, Shangyang, Ren, Yanhui, Yang, Kan, Yan, Zheng, Li, Hui, Yang, Yintang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accidents
Blockchain
Cryptography
Fault tolerance
Internet of Things
Internet of Things (IoT)
Network topologies
Protocols
Robustness
Security
Smart buildings
Synchronization
Time synchronization
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Summary:Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed rapidly to make our life easier. In many IoT applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, etc.), all the IoT devices should be synchronized in time. However, some malicious nodes located in the IoT network can influence the time synchronization, which may interrupt the IoT system and lead to serious accidents. Therefore, it is critical and challenging to guarantee the accuracy and consistency of time during the time synchronization among all the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based scheme to assure the security during time synchronization in IoT. Specifically, a publicly verifiable ledger is utilized to record and broadcast time, which can minimize many attacks from external environments. The use of multiple time sources can avoid the vulnerabilities caused by the centralized generation of accurate time. Moreover, the decentralized structure of this scheme has the advantage of adapting the changes of network topology. By employing an improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism, time synchronization can be implemented efficiently. At last, the analysis results show that our proposed scheme can achieve the desired security with high efficiency.
ISSN:2327-4662
2327-4662
DOI:10.1109/JIOT.2018.2874222