[Paper Review] Securing IoT Applications using Blockchain: A Survey

K. K. Sreelakshmi, Ashutosh Bhatia+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 5, 2020

Blockchain Technology Applications and Security42 references4 citations

TL;DR

This survey investigates the integration of blockchain technology to address critical security and privacy challenges in IoT systems, particularly those arising from centralized architectures. By leveraging blockchain's decentralization, immutability, and cryptographic security, the paper demonstrates how access control, authentication, and data integrity can be significantly enhanced in trustless IoT environments.

ABSTRACT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a guiding technology behind automation and smart computing. One of the major concerns with the IoT systems is the lack of privacy and security preserving schemes for controlling access and ensuring the security of the data. A majority of security issues arise because of the centralized architecture of IoT systems. Another concern is the lack of proper authentication and access control schemes to moderate access to information generated by the IoT devices. So the question that arises is how to ensure the identity of the equipment or the communicating node. The answer to secure operations in a trustless environment brings us to the decentralized solution of Blockchain. A lot of research has been going on in the area of convergence of IoT and Blockchain, and it has resulted in some remarkable progress in addressing some of the significant issues in the IoT arena. This work reviews the challenges and threats in the IoT environment and how integration with Blockchain can resolve some of them.

Motivation & Objective

• To identify core security and privacy challenges in existing centralized IoT architectures.
• To analyze the limitations of current authentication and access control mechanisms in IoT systems.
• To evaluate how blockchain technology can address these issues through decentralization and cryptographic trust.
• To provide a systematic review of existing IoT-blockchain integration approaches and their effectiveness.
• To highlight open research challenges and future directions in securing IoT applications using blockchain.

Proposed method

• Systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research on IoT and blockchain integration.
• Categorization of proposed solutions based on blockchain type (public, private, consortium), consensus mechanisms, and use cases.
• Analysis of cryptographic primitives used in IoT-blockchain systems, including digital signatures and hash functions.
• Evaluation of access control models such as attribute-based encryption and role-based access control in blockchain-secured IoT.
• Mapping of security threats (e.g., Sybil, replay attacks) to corresponding blockchain-based mitigation strategies.
• Comparison of performance trade-offs between scalability, latency, and security in different blockchain-IoT architectures.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What are the primary security and privacy threats in conventional, centralized IoT systems?
• RQ2 How does blockchain technology mitigate the risks associated with centralized trust models in IoT?
• RQ3 What are the key architectural and cryptographic components that enable secure IoT applications using blockchain?
• RQ4 How do different blockchain deployment models (public, private, consortium) impact the performance and security of IoT systems?
• RQ5 What are the open challenges and limitations in deploying blockchain for securing real-world IoT applications?

Key findings

• Blockchain effectively mitigates centralization risks by distributing trust across a network of nodes, reducing single points of failure.
• Decentralized identity management and cryptographic authentication in blockchain enhance device and user authenticity in IoT environments.
• Consensus mechanisms such as PBFT and PoA are more suitable for IoT due to lower latency and energy consumption compared to PoW.
• Attribute-based encryption and role-based access control integrated with blockchain improve fine-grained access control in IoT data sharing.
• Despite benefits, blockchain integration introduces scalability and performance overhead, especially in resource-constrained IoT devices.
• The survey identifies a lack of standardized frameworks and formal security models for IoT-blockchain systems as a major research gap.