Blockchain Authentication Mechanism for Securing Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things is a recent potential advancement in an IT arena, consists of multiple smart things (devices) which are connected through a physical network. Cisco incorporation predicts that IoT network will connect 50 billion devices by 2020. Most of the industries are adopting IoT technology and because of its fast spreading, immense adoption and deployment current authentication mechanisms have serious disadvantages. For numerous reasons the security issues are the major hurdle in adoption and deployment of IoT on a large scale since it is highly vulnerable to attacks. In this paper we propose a Blockchain based authentication mechanism i.e. Ethereum which is a public blockchain as it has emerged as a technology that possess great capabilities of providing secure authentication, management and access control for IoT devices in a decentralized, trusty and flexible manner by creating a secure environment where the devices can identify and trust each other and only authenticated users are given permission to access them.