A Blockchain-Based Software Always-On System

Abstract

Moving towards Industry 5.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become an indispensable role. IIoT devices could help manufacturing companies to observe various production statuses hence improving production efficiency. However, its limitation on resources and features makes robust security implementation a big challenge. Implementing a secure, general and scalable system to adopt across industries is one of the most critical topics for IIoT. This paper proposed a blockchain-based system architecture to auto-update, monitor, and fix the IIoT devices' software. We take the software status snapshots and store them as a blockchain ledger to protect the software's integrity and the software from unauthorized modification. To achieve auto-update and auto fix, we also simulate the concept of a blockchain contract to create the ledger whenever there are changes. As a result, the changes could continuously be tracked. The performance and scalability are also evaluated. The result shows that the system could also be deployed in larger-scale IIoT devices. The software update and fix could be guaranteed authenticated, and the unauthorized software could be monitored and detected.