Blockchain based holistic trust management protocol for ubiquitous and pervasive IoT network

ABSTRACT The new emerging blockchain (BC) technology integrated with the IoT ecosystem revolutionised the IoT world. Classic BC with bitcoin method was realised as very expensive operations difficult to adopt for smart IoT applications; therefore, we integrated IoT network with overlay BC with distributed ledger capability to provide a secure trust management system, which can address access control issues of devices on resources. Further, the R-LEACH protocol followed by the same group urges additional cluster head requirement to establish trust between nodes is not considered in our proposed approach. The main advantage of this method is utilising ledgers for holding the trust and IoT information ensuring tamper-proof data. The miners of blockchain layer perform the trust value calculations based on trust evidence and achieved fast trust convergence, accuracy, and resilience against adversary attacks. Our proposed approach enhances privacy, reliability, availability, and more importantly, sharing and storage of trust information and also followed the consensus mechanism Proof-of-Authority (PoA) to approve the synthesis trust value of related transactions by the pre-authenticated miners/validators, from which we can take more accurate trust-based decisions. Performance results of our blockchain-based trust management approach outperformed literature review trust mechanisms for protecting trust data manipulation against the malicious nodes.