How can you secure the Internet of Things with blockchain technology?
In this guide, we learn how to secure the Internet of Things with blockchain technology
Smart cities are an example of a large-scale IoT implementation that is within our technological reach.
Our lives will become more productive thanks to smart cities. Cities will never experience traffic congestion again thanks to connected gadgets and information managed by an intelligent system. With the use of various sensors that identify waste, connected technology can also make cities more energy efficient. It has not materialized despite the tech sector raving about it for fifteen years.
Most distributions ignore the requirements of the hardware in favor of exclusively distributing equipment. Deployments have therefore failed or been ignored for a very long time.
In this article, we’ll walk through an example of infrastructure installation as well as the issues of widespread connectivity and device security. Blockchain is a kind of decentralized ledger that can help solve the security problems caused by IoT.
IoT installations are plagued by three main problems.
The network must be secured first. 5G networks are used in certain IoT deployments to provide connectivity. Because there are so many devices connected to these massive networks, hackers find them an extremely tempting target. In addition, the network contains potentially sensitive data that hackers can also attack.
Integration of data is the other problem. How are data from different sources related to each other? Some of this information may include personal user information, such as a social security number, commercial information held by a business, customer usage patterns, or public information, such as the status of traffic lights right now.
These bits of data must communicate somehow, but doing so presents difficulties. They include data security, data ownership and privacy. There are also doubts about the ownership of the data. For example, information about cars at a traffic light will be recorded, but whose data is it? Who installed the sensors to get the data – the respective car owners or the authorities?
Insecure IoT devices are the third and final problem. This problem is significant because a hacked device can be used to target other network devices. Organizations are required to monitor and control device interactions.
How to secure IoT deployments?
Random neural networks and decentralized ledger technologies combine as one security mechanism to solve IoT security, giving users the ability to authenticate and audit themselves anonymously.
Data between two parties is first encrypted and decrypted in a very secure way using a random neural network. The hijacking of the network is a problem that the neural network fixes. Neural network encryption ensures that even if a hacker managed to hijack or eavesdrop on a network, the data would be meaningless.
Second, blockchain significantly reduces the need for security. It can be used as an auditing system to handle key management, encryption, de-identification, blocking queries, authentication and access control. Due to its distributed voting mechanism to regulate bandwidth and power demand, blockchain can help prevent distributed denial of service attacks against IoT devices.
The power and data resources available to IoT devices are limited. To get the best benefits, blockchain implementations should ideally be cloud-integrated. The lack of trust among IoT devices should also be addressed, as well as single points of failure and the ability to predict interzone mobility using Markov prediction models and IoT crypto tokens.
This solution provides functionality for anonymous authentication and auditing. From an infrastructure standpoint, blockchain handles most of the work; yet this is by design.
There are downsides to every implementation, of course. Scalability in terms of computing power and physical space requirements is the biggest disadvantage of adopting blockchain for a significant part of this project. Consider how blockchain distributes IoT devices as you implement this solution.