ere has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of ings (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. is paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy bene ts. IoT devices bene t from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. e proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home se ing as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. alitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its e ectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead signi cantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.
BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its immutable nature and the associated security and privacy benefits. BC has the potential to overcome security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, BC is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited to the IoT context. We propose a tiered Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements. We explore LSB in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Low resource devices in a smart home benefit from a centralized manager that establishes shared keys for communication and processes all incoming and outgoing requests. LSB achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage a public BC that ensures end-to-end privacy and security. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public BC. LSB incorporates several optimizations which include algorithms for lightweight consensus, distributed trust and throughput management. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that LSB is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that LSB decreases packet overhead and delay and increases BC scalability compared to relevant baselines.
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