A DLT-based Trust Framework for IoT Ecosystems

Abstract

An IoT eco-system includes IoT network components, network services and network participants such as organizations, consumers, governments, and businesses. Due to its diversity and scale, trustworthiness is a critical concern to be considered during architectural design and the operational phase of these eco-systems. To do this, security, privacy, reliability, resilience and safety must be assured. However, existing solutions partially address these requirements using centralized approaches that come with challenges such as a single point of failure, scalability, and dependence on a third party. In this context, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts, due to its intrinsic properties of transparency, immutability, and underlying secure-by-design architecture, allows distributed, decentralized, automated workflows, which can be incorporated to automate the management of the next generation IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for IoT eco-systems providing seamless integration between IoT and DLT to create a decentralized trusted architecture, which ensures trustworthiness of IoT eco-systems at design time and a trust reputation model based on the architecture to protect it during the run-time. Furthermore, we have presented the initial steps towards the implementation of this framework.