Comparative study on hash functions for lightweight blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a great interest in the Internet of Things (IoT). This is mainly because the IoT interacts directly with people's everyday lives in critical applications, such as in smart homes and healthcare applications. IoT devices typically have a resource-constrained architecture, rendering them vulnerable to cyberattacks. Accordingly, smart devices and stored data need to be secured through lightweight and energy-efficient security solutions, which have been identified as the main challenge facing adoption of IoT systems. To address this problem, a disruptive technology (blockchain) has been foreseen by the industry and research community as being able to deliver secure, fast, reliable, and transparent solutions for IoT systems. Hence, this work investigates the adoption of lightweight blockchain technology, mainly as a method of securing IoT systems. Because hashing plays a major role in creating a robust blockchain structure, we select a number of different hash techniques to be executed on a Raspberry Pi device. In summation, this work provides a numerical study to evaluate the performance of well-known hash functions that can be used for lightweight blockchain-based IoT.