Securing IoT Firmware Dispatch Systems with Blockchain

Abstract

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have become a prevalent part of everyday life, making the need for IoT firmware security greater than ever. Firmware dispatch systems play a crucial role in maintaining the secure operations of IoT devices, where a compromise on the integrity of dispatches may simply ruin an IoT device. Hence it is essential to have robust solutions to safeguard such systems. With the advent of blockchain and Web3 technologies, there are new options for tackling security-related challenges. Blockchain provides a tamper-proof, secure, and fully distributed protocol, making it an excellent choice for a firmware dispatch system. In this work, we explore the existing blockchain-based solutions for distributing IoT firmware updates, and then propose a secure firmware dispatch system for IoT devices using Ethereum. Our system employs Web3.Storage, with a hosted implementation of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that our designed architecture is fast, reliable, and scalable by offering a firmware integrity validation. It can benefit a wide range of manufacturers who intend to increase the security of their IoT devices.