A Secure and Cost-Efficient Blockchain Facilitated IoT Software Update Framework

Abstract

As resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices become popular targets of various malicious attacks, frequent updates to keep their software up to date are essential to their security. However, state-of-the-art software delivery and payment systems incorporate multiple services in a client-server structure requiring multiple transits of information between client and server, while also creating a wide attack surface. We propose a blockchain-based end-to-end secure software update delivery framework for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which aims to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, efficiency, and audit-ability for verified software delivery, while offloading the cryptographic computation from resourceconstrained IoT devices to a decentralized blockchain system. In particular, we leverage Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and design a customized authorization policy to not only ensure that software updates can only be decrypted and installed on authorized IoT devices but also significantly reduce the computational overhead for key generation and key delivery on the manufacturer side. Furthermore, secure and atomic software delivery and payments between IoT devices and the manufacturer are assured through smart contracts. The authenticity of the delivered software is guaranteed by offloading the computation-based signature validation to smart contracts. Compliance audits are satisfied through immutable records on the blockchain's public ledger, and the smart contracts efficiently guarantee the delivery of software updates in exchange for payment. Security analysis and experiments are performed to compare the proposed framework with state-of-the-art studies and validate its effectiveness.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, Internet of Things, software update, secure software update, computer security, CP-ABE, smart contract.

Security-enhanced firmware management scheme for smart home IoT devices using distributed ledger technologies

“…However, that process is not scalable due to the scalability limitations of their communication protocols. [51], our method performs IOTA MAM based firmware meta data communication, IPFS based decentralized firmware file distribution, a hash verification for firmware binaries and autonomous firmware update mechanisms. Due to the application of IOTA, IPFS and MQTT where scalability comes along with their technologies, our method is highly scalable.…”

“…Compared to past research [6,18,37,51], our method performs a hash verification for firmware binaries and an autonomous firmware update mechanism that sends a message through the IOTA tangle. Furthermore, our method is highly scalable, has a low latency and charges no transaction fees, as we use IOTA protocol instead of blockchain technology.…”