Leveraging Cryptographic Primitives Of Blockchain For Trust In Smart Systems

Abstract

Smart systems are very common nowadays like smart cities, smart vehicle parking systems, smart buildings, etc. Any smart system is smart only till the time, all components of it are exchanging data among each other without any fear of data theft and modification. There are several issues and challenges with current smart systems, Many existing smart systems rely on centralized trust authorities, which can be vulnerable to attacks, single points of failure, and compromised trust. Current systems often struggle with maintaining user privacy while establishing trust. Moreover, Ensuring the integrity and authenticity of data is crucial in current smart systems. Nodes in a smart system, do calculate the trust of every other related node depending upon their experience with that specific node and recommendations of other nodes about that specific node. Trust once calculated is prone to integrity attacks by malicious nodes in the system. Bad-mouthing and ballot stuffing are two common attacks that affect the complete trust calculation mechanism and the final trust values. To avoid such attacks, trust can be calculated by blockchain and once calculated, It can be stored on the chain so that it can be retrieved whenever needed by any desirous node avoiding integrity issues and mitigating many threats. Hyper Ledger Fabric is a private, permissioned blockchain and can be used by smart devices for calculations and storage of trust values of each node in a decentralized manner. This research focuses on securing the trust calculation mechanism using a private instance of Hyper ledger Fabric. We implemented a healthcare scenario on an HLF network and simulated the secure trust calculation of trust among IoT devices on the chain. The results prove that by using the cryptographic properties of Blockchains, we can improve the overall security and trust in an IoT system.