Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain for Securing the Edge Internet of Things

• Main Authors: Houshyar Honar Pajooh, Mohammad Rashid, Fakhrul Alam, Serge Demidenko
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Internet of Things; hyperledger fabric; smart contract; security and privacy; data provenance; edge computing
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/2/359

Providing security and privacy to the Internet of Things (IoT) networks while achieving it with minimum performance requirements is an open research challenge. Blockchain technology, as a distributed and decentralized ledger, is a potential solution to tackle the limitations of the current peer-to-peer IoT networks. This paper presents the development of an integrated IoT system implementing the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) to secure the edge computing devices by employing a local authentication process. In addition, the proposed model provides traceability for the data generated by the IoT devices. The presented solution also addresses the IoT systems’ scalability challenges, the processing power and storage issues of the IoT edge devices in the blockchain network. A set of built-in queries is leveraged by smart-contracts technology to define the rules and conditions. The paper validates the performance of the proposed model with practical implementation by measuring performance metrics such as transaction throughput and latency, resource consumption, and network use. The results show that the proposed platform with the HLF implementation is promising for the security of resource-constrained IoT devices and is scalable for deployment in various IoT scenarios.