Securing Firmware in Internet of Things using Blockchain

Abstract

As of today, most of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices work in a centralized environment. With IoT devices having to execute thousands of operations per second, it has become difficult for centralized systems to handle such platforms. Also, factors like operational and maintenance cost of these server machines and danger of DoS(Denial of Service) attack on such servers has threatened the practitioners to come up with a more distributed way of storing the contents. With its decentralized and privacy preserving features, blockchain technology fits well into the scheme of things. This mitigates the quintessential challenges faced in most of the centralized systems. In this paper, we are focusing on the new firmware update scheme to perform the update operations securely. We propose a blockchain based solution for managing firmware updates in IoT. Improper management of devices and distribution of firmware updates from the device vendor could sabotage the IoT ecosystem. The objective of this proposed scheme is to verify and distribute the firmware binaries securely to the IoT device deployed by the device vendor. The PUSH-based method is used for a firmware update in which verification of firmware is done by Hash Chain. It preserves the integrity of firmware by linking the latest version information by previous versions information with the help of a smart contract mechanism.