A Blockchain-driven Elastic Firmware Deployment Platform for TR-069 Compatible Appliances

Abstract

The computing capability of the embedded systems and bandwidth of the home network increase rapidly due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies. Many home appliances such as TVs, refrigerators, or air conditioners are now connected to the internet, then, the controlling firmware modules are automatically updatable via the network. TR-069 is a widely adopted standard for automatic appliance management and firmware update. Maintaining a TR-069 network usually involves the design and deployment of the overall security and trust infrastructure, the update file repository and the update audit mechanisms. Thus, maintaining a dedicated TR-069 network is a heavy burden for the vendors of home appliances. Blockchain is an emerging technology that provides a secure and trust infrastructure based on distributed consensus. This paper reports the results of our initial attempt to design a prototype of a multitenant TR-069 platform based on the blockchain. The core idea is to reify each automatic deployment task as a smart contract instance whose transactions are recorded in the append-only distributed ledger and verified by the peers. Also, the overall design should be transparent to the original TR-069 entities. We have built a prototype based on the proposed architecture to verify the feasibility in three key scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is feasible and is able to scale linearly in proportion to the number of managed devices.