Towards Realizing Lightweight Consensus Protocol for IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the network of heterogeneous computing devices that are web-enabled and have the capabilities of sensing, collecting, processing, and disseminating data. The IoT devices are embedded with various sensors or actuators supported by communication hardware and protocols to ensure their deployment for real-world applications. Furthermore, these devices can use logic building with sensor inputs and on connecting actuators to generate relevant output. With numerous applications but the unavailability of basic security policies, interoperability issues, and resource constraint environment, IoT devices nowadays face lots of difficulty in terms of ensuring communication security. Also, the use of simple processors and stripped-down operating systems which may not support sophisticated security approaches, make IoT systems vulnerable to security attacks. The advent of blockchain technology paved the way to secure data or information using distributed hashed ledger of transactions. With blockchain, one can ensure the secure sharing and dissemination of data between the entities running blockchain network. However, deploying blockchain with IoT systems may hinder their performance and efficiency because of resource constraint characteristics of heterogeneous devices. In this research work, we have explored a lightweight blockchain-based approach using AERGO blockchain to secure data transfer between IoT devices. The same has been confirmed for validity and effectiveness using a test-bed setup of IoT devices.