A Blockchain Approach for Negotiating Trust in IoT

Abstract

“The internet is no longer a web that we connect to. Instead, its a computerized, networked, and interconnected world that we live in. This is the future, and what were calling the Internet of Things.”- Bruce Schneier, 2019 The Internet of Things is becoming a big part of our lives. Every year there are more devices with the capability to connect on the internet and communicate with each other. Today there are over 400 million IoT devices in the world, and this number is predicted to grow to 1.5 billion devices by 2022 [14]. It is becoming more difficult to manage all IoT devices and to know with which device to connect to request a service. In addition, a device can fail at some point or stop providing a good service. There is a need to find a better way to store data about all transactions between devices to provide the basis for a way to establish the trust between devices. In this thesis, we propose a solution to use a blockchain in order to store transaction data and an algorithm that establishes trust between devices in the same network.