Chain Veri: Blockchain-Based Firmware Verification System for IoT Environment

Abstract

The number of deployed Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been increasing rapidly, and security has become significantly important in IoT environments. However, security issues remain challenging due to constraints of IoT devices. One critical security issue is that attacks tamper the firmware of IoT devices. Once the firmware is tampered, it is difficult to notice and recover the tampered firmware. For the integrity of firmware, this paper proposes a new blockchain-based firmware verification system, called Chain Veri. We overcome vulnerabilities of previous studies such as fudging firmware verification. Furthermore, unlike previous studies that presented only the concepts and ideas, we implement Chain Veri from scratch and carry out performance evaluation on storage consumption and CPU cycles to run Chain Veri on IoT device. Our results show that only 1.2MB of storage is used to verify 2,845 devices. Also, 1,692 CPU cycles are to generate a palette in ChainVeri.