Securing Data Flow in IoT Blockchain Integration Time Synchronization and End to End Security

Abstract

newline The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain has emphasized significant attention from both academia and industry. While existing research highlights the potential benefits of combining Blockchain with IoT systems for smart applications, there exists a critical research gap concerning the technical feasibility of integration, particularly in the case of time synchronization where IoT nodes lack internal clock mechanisms. This limitation poses challenges in establishing real time data processing and storing into Blockchain network. Blockchain network relies on precise time synchronization among all participating nodes. As a result, integration of IoT nodes with Blockchain network must have proper data synchronization. This initial technical challenge needs to address for any IoT and Blockchain based smart applications. Present state of the art research studies IoT-Blockchain integration across diverse domains such as agriculture, supply chain management, healthcare, smart cities, and industry, none adequately address the data security issue arising when external data interacts with the Blockchain network. To bridge this gap, this research proposes a two-part solution. newline newlineThe first initial stage, a secure time-sharing mechanism is proposed using attribute-based encryption (ABE) to synchronize IoT time constrained nodes with the Blockchain network. The access policies are based on the nodes characteristics to facilitate only selective legitimate IoT node connect to the Blockchain network. In the second stage, the research tackles data security issues, including unauthorized access and tampering, during data transmission between nodes. An end-to-end data security layer is proposed to achieve authentication, access control, confidentiality, and integrity checks. This layer safeguards the data using secret code generation to authenticate data from legitimate IoT node and prevents unauthorized access and alternation of data. newlineThe proposed solutions are validated through experimentation using het