Ali Dorri

Blockchain for IoT security and privacy: The case study of a smart home

Internet of Things (IoT) security and privacy remain a major challenge, mainly due to the massive scale and distributed nature of IoT networks. Blockchain-based approaches provide decentralized security and privacy, yet they involve significant energy, delay, and computational overhead that is not suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices. In our previous work, we presented a lightweight instantiation of a BC particularly geared for use in IoT by eliminating the Proof of Work (POW) and the concept of coins. Our approach was exemplified in a smart home setting and consists of three main tiers namely: cloud storage, overlay, and smart home. In this paper we delve deeper and outline the various core components and functions of the smart home tier. Each smart home is equipped with an always online, high resource device, known as “miner” that is responsible for handling all communication within and external to the home. The miner also preserves a private and secure BC, used for controlling and auditing communications. We show that our proposed BC-based smart home framework is secure by thoroughly analysing its security with respect to the fundamental security goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, we present simulation results to highlight that the overheads (in terms of traffic, processing time and energy consumption) introduced by our approach are insignificant relative to its security and privacy gains.

Towards an Optimized BlockChain for IoT

There has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of Things (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. IoT devices benefit from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. The proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead significantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.

BlockChain: A Distributed Solution to Automotive Security and Privacy

Interconnected smart vehicles offer a range of sophisticated services that benefit the vehicle owners, transport authorities, car manufacturers, and other service providers. This potentially exposes smart vehicles to a range of security and privacy threats such as location tracking or remote hijacking of the vehicle. In this article, we argue that blockchain (BC), a disruptive technology that has found many applications from cryptocurrencies to smart contracts, is a potential solution to these challenges. We propose a BC-based architecture to protect the privacy of users and to increase the security of the vehicular ecosystem. Wireless remote software updates and other emerging services such as dynamic vehicle insurance fees are used to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed security architecture. We also qualitatively argue the resilience of the architecture against common security attacks.

Secure Wireless Automotive Software Updates Using Blockchains: A Proof of Concept

Future smart vehicles will employ automotive over-the-air updates to update the soft ware in the embedded electronic control units. The update process can affect the safety of the involved users, thus requires a comprehensive and elaborate security architecture ensuring the confidentiality and the integrity of the exchanged data, as well as protecting the privacy of the involved users. In this paper, we propose an automotive security architecture employing Blockchain to tackle the implicated security and privacy challenges. We describe our proof-of-concept implementation of a Blockchain-based software update system, use it to show the applicability of our architecture for automotive systems, and evaluate different aspects of our architecture.

Towards a Privacy-Preserving Way of Vehicle Data Sharing – A Case for Blockchain Technology?

Vehicle data is a valuable source for digital services, especially with a rising degree of driving automatization. Despite regulation on data protection has become stricter due to Europe’s GDPR we argue that the exchange of vehicle and driving data will massively increase. We therefore raise the question on what would be a privacy-preserving way of vehicle data exploitation? Blockchain technology could be an enabler, as it is associated with privacy-friendly concepts including transparency, trust, and decentralization. Hence, we launch the discussion on unsolved technical and non-technical issues and provide a concept for an Open Vehicle Data Platform, respecting the privacy of both the vehicle owner and driver using Blockchain technology.