Smart Contract based Distributed IoT Security: A Protocol for Autonomous Device Management

Abstract

The proliferation of IoT devices in society demands a renewed focus on securing the use and maintenance of such systems. IoT-based systems have a significant impact on society and therefore such systems must have guaranteed resilience. We introduce a solution as a protocol that utilizes smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to enforce a security model that helps maintain distributed IoT networks in a healthy condition throughout their lifecycle. Our protocol enforces secured deployment, communication, management, and maintenance for hardened IoT devices. We additionally propose a smart contract solution for creating and handling generic IoT tasks. This solution enables users to manage devices by utilizing the Ethereum infrastructure for authentication, authorization, and communication. This design allows the devices to function autonomously by interpreting tasks received through smart contract transactions, without any direct human to device interaction. The result is a protocol that provides mechanisms for authentication and authorization, task provisioning, and audit trails.