A Lightweight Blockchain-based Technique for Anti-Tampering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are nowadays used in a variety of applications, to monitor relevant quantities often in large and harsh environments, thanks to their flexibility and versatility. Unfortunately, the nature of the wireless communication channel exposes WSN nodes to security risks. Conventional security countermeasures cannot be applied to the WSN nodes due their resource limitations. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain approach to contrast the physical or logical tampering of WSN nodes. We validate our approach through experiments showing the performance impact and the storage footprint due to the use of the proposed blockchain anti-tampering technique. The proposed approach appears to be suitable in the context of WSNs, although the overhead generated by the blockchain depends on the number of nodes in the WSN.