Use of blockchains for secure binding of metadata in military applications of IoT

Abstract

Blockchains offer an interesting solution to some of the security challenges encountered in military applications. They are particularly attractive in the scenarios, where it is difficult or even impossible to establish a common root of trust, e.g., in the context of civil-military collaboration, where military organizations need to build trusted information exchange infrastructure with various types of civilian governmental and non-governmental organizations, local communities, commercial companies and private persons. In our work, we discuss how blockchain can be used to store metadata describing information collected from the IoT devices owned by the federation members as well as crowdsourced from sensors belonging to private users. We present a high level architecture for a metadata binding solution using blockchains compliant with STANAG 4774 and 4778. We also describe a concrete technical solution based on Hyperledger Fabric and some of the open issues.