The overlap between IoT and DLT

IoT and DLT have several things in common:

• Both of them are early-stage technologies in a fairly new market
• Both of them need standards and industry-led initiatives to reach critical mass adoption.
• Both of them need business models that imply the redefinition of relationships between the actors involved
• For both of them, rather than the technology itself, business and regulations are the main challenges to overcome

Are there other things they have in common?

Yes, digital identity.

Image source: https://cutt.ly/xe7y0ei

Status quo:

• There is no single, universally recognized device identity that can be used for all purposes with an IoT device.
• As the IoT expands this has the potential to negatively impact scalability due to multiple silos of information.
• Critical data of authenticated devices can be tampered by inner attacks without being identified.
• The existing identity authentication of IoT devices mostly depends on an intermediary institution, i.e., a CA server, which suffers from the single-point-failure attack.

Blockchain technology addresses these issues through a secure tamper-proof distributed ledger. What is a DLT digital ledger?

IoT is a combination of hardware and software that allows data exchange between machine to machine, machine to human, machine to cloud. Data is without any doubt the most valuable digital asset on internet, and blockchain is the proper network of Value — Exchange.

Our research and development project:

We are developing a PoC that assigns a unique ID for each device and records it into the blockchain so that they can authenticate each other without a central authority. We will implement a prototype based on an open-source blockchain platform, Hyperledger INDY, to verify the proposed system.

Future developments:

• Device to device data exchange.
• Design a data protection mechanism by hashing significant data (i.e. firmware) into the blockchain where any state changes of the data can be detected immediately.

For more information, fill-up the form, or send us an email info@blockchainmentoringlab.com

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