Additional Funding Sources
This research was supported by NSF CISE REU, Award No. 2051127.
Abstract
In 2022 on average there are about 16 Internet-of-Things(IoT) devices per household. Since these IoT devices have the capability of connecting to the internet, there is also opportunity of collecting data using these IoT devices. \textbf{Assuming some of these data are insensitive and the owner is willing to share them,} there is an opportunity to gather more data than what one owner is capable of gathering on his/her own. One example of this is pretend each house in a city have a soil moisture sensor. If there is a way to gather all the data that each soil moisture sensor in the city have collected. Then you have a picture of the water content in the soil in the whole city, instead of just one small area where your soil moisture sensor is. On the other hand you can do the alternative, buy enough soil moisture sensor to cover the whole city (assuming you are trying to get the water content of the soil in the whole city). Using blockchain for access management of shared IoT devices, we can have a transparent record of who have utilized access of specific IoT devices. With the reputation based system the users are incentivized to share their data as much as possible. Sharing valid data and participating in data validation awards device owners with more reputation. The higher the device owner's reputation the more device data he/she can access. By encrypting device data in the database the systems guarantee that data has not been tampered with. To compensate for the limitations of IoT devices, IoT devices will only handle encryption of the data they have collected and have an off-chain database that stores all the encrypted data.
Leveraging Blockchain for IoT Access Management
In 2022 on average there are about 16 Internet-of-Things(IoT) devices per household. Since these IoT devices have the capability of connecting to the internet, there is also opportunity of collecting data using these IoT devices. \textbf{Assuming some of these data are insensitive and the owner is willing to share them,} there is an opportunity to gather more data than what one owner is capable of gathering on his/her own. One example of this is pretend each house in a city have a soil moisture sensor. If there is a way to gather all the data that each soil moisture sensor in the city have collected. Then you have a picture of the water content in the soil in the whole city, instead of just one small area where your soil moisture sensor is. On the other hand you can do the alternative, buy enough soil moisture sensor to cover the whole city (assuming you are trying to get the water content of the soil in the whole city). Using blockchain for access management of shared IoT devices, we can have a transparent record of who have utilized access of specific IoT devices. With the reputation based system the users are incentivized to share their data as much as possible. Sharing valid data and participating in data validation awards device owners with more reputation. The higher the device owner's reputation the more device data he/she can access. By encrypting device data in the database the systems guarantee that data has not been tampered with. To compensate for the limitations of IoT devices, IoT devices will only handle encryption of the data they have collected and have an off-chain database that stores all the encrypted data.