Secure Asset Tracking in Manufacturing through Employing IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

Today, manufacturing industry is increasingly embracing new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, cloud computing and cybersecurity to cope with system complexity, increase information visibility, improve production performance, and gain competitive advantages in the global market. These advances are rapidly enabling a new generation of smart manufacturing, i.e., a cyber-physical system tightly integrating manufacturing enterprises in the physical world with virtual enterprises in cyberspace. To a great extent, realizing the full potential of cyber-physical systems depends on the development of new methodologies on the Internet of Manufacturing Things (IoMT) for data-enabled engineering innovations. This article presents a real implementation of IOTA Tangle architecture for data transactions extended with HMAC signing through using STM32 (F7 CPU) IoT devices. The evaluation results show promising with 32 light nodes to exceed 28 transactions per second by using 4 full nodes, thus making IOTA-based distributed ledger an effective solution for IoT-based manufacturing environments with zero-value (data) transactions.