BA-TLS: Blockchain Authentication for Transport Layer Security in Internet of Things

Traditional security solutions that rely on public key infrastructure present scalability and transparency challenges when deployed in Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we develop a blockchain based authentication mechanism for IoT that can be integrated into the traditional transport layer security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Our proposed mechanism is an alternative to the traditional Certificate Authority (CA)-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that relies on x.509 certificates. Specifically, the proposed solution enables the modified TLS/DTLS a viable option for resource constrained IoT devices where minimizing memory utilization is critical. Experiments show that blockchain based authentication can reduce dynamic memory usage by up to 20%, while only minimally increasing application image size and time of execution of the TLS/DTLS handshake.