The convergence of Blockchain and Machine Learning for Decentralized Trust Management in IoT Ecosystems

Abstract

The EU data strategy postulates that by 2025 there will be a paradigm shift towards more decentralized intelligence and data processing at the edge. The convergence of a large number of nodes at the IoT edge along with multiple service providers and network operators exposes data owners and resource providers to potential threats. To address cloud-edge risks, trust-based decentralized management is needed. Blockchain technology has created an opportunity to decentralize IoT ecosystems, through its intrinsic properties and together with machine learning (ML) it can be used to provide a trusted backbone for managing IoT ecosystems to support automated and adaptive trust management. This paper presents a novel approach for crosslayer intelligent trust computation modelling leveraging ML and Blockchain for decentralized trust management in IoT ecosystems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach for flow-based trust assessment is demonstrated using the Hyperledger Framework and the Cooja-based simulation environment. Finally, an initial evaluation is presented to understand the performance in terms of scalability and trust convergence of the proposed model.