SoftBloC: An IoT Security and Privacy Architecture for a Cashierless Retail Store

The constantly shifting needs and expectations of customers in respect of seamless shopping experience has continued to drive retail store businesses to evolve their approaches. Advancing the previous self-checkout technology is the cashierless retailing solution which aims to reduce the number of human resources present in retail stores at any time and eliminate queues at checkout points. While cashierless retailing improves the customer experience, the most challenging aspect of its implementation and adoption is security and data privacy, specifically Internet of Things (IoT) devices and network security, and data privacy protection. In this paper, we leveraged deep learning, computer vision (image recognition), cryptography and blockchain technologies to devise a new security and privacy architecture. The eventual solution design, tagged SoftBloC (Software Defined Blockchain Cryptography), has been architected to combine these technologies with the IoT data routing technique (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy, LEACH) to provide security and privacy architecture for a cashierless retail store. We adopted a layered approach to delineate and analyse the key security and privacy concerns, whilst offering effective solutions to mitigate these concerns.