Blockchain-Based Distributed Network Architecture for Internet of Things

IoT networks have already been widely deployed due to their convenience and low-cost advantage. However, due to the lack of strong self-protection mechanisms and the imperfect network architectures, many IoT devices are vulnerable to malicious cyber-attacks, which will further threaten the availability and security of IoT applications. Therefore, securing the network infrastructure while protecting data from malicious or unauthorized devices/users become a vital aspect of IoT network design. In the thesis, two types of IoT security mechanisms are mainly investigated, namely, IoT routing protection and smart community device authentication. By adopting the distributed consensus mechanism, we propose a blockchain-based reputation management system in IoT routing networks to overcome the limitation of centralized router RM systems. The proposed solution utilizes the blockchain technique as a decentralized database to store routing reports for calculating reputation of each router. With the proposed reputation calculation mechanism, the reliability of each router would be evaluated, and the malicious misbehaving routers with low reputations will be blacklisted and get isolated. More importantly, we develop an efficient group mining process for blockchain technique in order to improve the efficiency of block generation and reduce the resource consumption. We propose a novel sidechain structure via optimized two-way peg protocol for device authentication in the smart community in order to overcome the limitations of existing authentication approaches. The proposed sidechain structure requires the mainchain mining nodes to only store the local mainchain blocks without downloading the entire mainchain after each block generation. By using Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) proof, the existence of the target authentication information could be proved. Moreover, we propose an optimized two-way peg protocol in order to prevent the worthless information injection attack during the information sharing procedure. Consequently, the simulation results prove the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of reducing authentication time, improving information management efficiency and decreasing storage consumption as compared to existing works, and the applicability and feasibility of the optimized two-way peg protocol have been approved