Blockchain technology and IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT), an evolutionary technology that raised and gained huge scope in the science and
engineering applications solving problems without the intervention of human-human work force. It enables mostly
smart work force i.e. creating an interaction between human to machine, machine to machine. The internet of things
(IoT) enabled a common operating picture (COP) across the various applications of modern day living1.The COP is
achieved through the advancements seen in wireless sensor network devices that were able to communicate through the network thereby exchanging information and performing various analysis1. From this point one must clearly
understand that IoT is not a single technology, it is a combination of multiple technologies that would work for the
smart ness achievement2-4. These technologies include communication technology, information technology,
electronic sensor and actuator technology, and the trending advancements in computing and analytics. The
integration of all such technologies could make it complex and difficulty in handling when working on wider and
large application point of view2-5. The complex scale of device integration, network interconnection, and distributed
nature of the things in IoT gives a scope for central server concept where all the things or the devices would
compulsory relay on it for authentication. In this case the interconnection between the devices would become
unreliable allowing the data sharing with false authentications or allowing device spoofing leading to insecure data
flow. For clear understanding of the problem concerned with IoT, one can refer to the views of Gartner expressed in
2016 and International Telecommunication Union reports of 20156,7. These two reports suggest that in future i.e. by
the end of 2020, twenty billion physical things could connect to the internet and operate as a single network under
IoT6,7. This statement suggests that IoT could be become much more complex in the coming future by connecting to
a Network of Plentiful Things (NPT) making a provision for digital access. In such cases, the NPT devices could
obtain enormous amount of information from the inclosing boundaries or the application or focus environment.
These devices must communicate with the network and software defined computing and analytics platform, and this
process is completely done through internet and leading to a point of central server storage. This communication
results in the rich interactions between the things and network IoT architecture giving a scope for huge data
generation allowing the reliable and trustworthy services over the wide area network of things through the
Centralized Data Management Servers (CDMS). Here, reliability and trustworthiness in providing services could not
be done in fully secure manner. Chances of security and privacy issues with the data is possible and it is due to the
due to the sensitive ness of the things that are interconnected among them as well as the network. More provision
and chances exist for reveling the sensitive aspects of the data to outside world (outside of the communicating
network or NPT) through the false authentications, device spoofing.This leads to the various security and privacy
issues in IoT making it as a challenge to encounter8,9.
To address the security and privacy issues in IoT, we can eliminate centralized maintenance of the NPT produced
data and thereby introducing the new Distributed Ledger-based technology called, a blockchain technology. This
paper focuses on the blockchain technology in IoT by analyzing the possible data interruptions and security
concerns during the IoT component interaction.
The organization of this article is structured in four sections. In section-2, various possible issues and challenges
in IoT are identified. In section-3, a study of blockchain is undertaken to identify whether it could address these
issues in IoT or not. Finally, the article is concluded with the outcomes of BC in IoT and future scope of BC in
various possible ways is briefed