Reliable IoT Data Management Platform Based on Real-World Cooperation Through Blockchain

This article proposes a new data management platform using blockchain that contributes to verify the integrity of the real-world data obtained from the IoT (Internet of Things) devices (e.g., camera, smart meter, smartphone) deployed on the real world. The existing blockchain-based platform guarantees the integrity of only the data registered inside the blockchain but does not detect the situation that the data is tampered and/or spoofed outside the blockchain. The proposed platform is designed based on the characteristic of the IoT system that the real-world data is continuously generated from the origin IoT device and there may exist various sensing devices (e.g., smartphone, sensor node) in the vicinity of the origin device. In the integrity verification mechanism, the origin device requests the surrounding devices to cooperate to verify the integrity of the real-world data. The tendency of the real-world data of the origin device should be almost the same as the data generated by the cooperator devices if the data tampering/spoofing did not occur. Therefore, by comparing the real-world data generated by the origin and the cooperator devices on the blockchain, the proposed platform verifies the integrity of the real-world data on the whole part of the IoT system.