Thesis Format
Monograph
Degree
Master of Engineering Science
Program
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Supervisor
Wang, Xianbin
Abstract
IoT networks have already been widely deployed due to their convenience and low-cost advantage. However, due to the lack of strong self-protection mechanisms and the imperfect network architectures, many IoT devices are vulnerable to malicious cyber-attacks, which will further threaten the availability and security of IoT applications. Therefore, securing the network infrastructure while protecting data from malicious or unauthorized devices/users become a vital aspect of IoT network design. In the thesis, two types of IoT security mechanisms are mainly investigated, namely, IoT routing protection and smart community device authentication.
By adopting the distributed consensus mechanism, we propose a blockchain-based reputation management system in IoT routing networks to overcome the limitation of centralized router RM systems. The proposed solution utilizes the blockchain technique as a decentralized database to store routing reports for calculating reputation of each router. With the proposed reputation calculation mechanism, the reliability of each router would be evaluated, and the malicious misbehaving routers with low reputations will be blacklisted and get isolated. More importantly, we develop an efficient group mining process for blockchain technique in order to improve the efficiency of block generation and reduce the resource consumption.
We propose a novel sidechain structure via optimized two-way peg protocol for device authentication in the smart community in order to overcome the limitations of existing authentication approaches. The proposed sidechain structure requires the mainchain mining nodes to only store the local mainchain blocks without downloading the entire mainchain after each block generation. By using Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) proof, the existence of the target authentication information could be proved. Moreover, we propose an optimized two-way peg protocol in order to prevent the worthless information injection attack during the information sharing procedure. Consequently, the simulation results prove the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of reducing authentication time, improving information management efficiency and decreasing storage consumption as compared to existing works, and the applicability and feasibility of the optimized two-way peg protocol have been approved.
Summary for Lay Audience
With the emergence of wireless communications and smart devices, lots of progress have been made in the field of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT networks have already been widely deployed for its convenience and low-cost advantage. However, due to the lack of self-protection mechanisms and the imperfect network architectures, many IoT devices are very vulnerable for malicious cyber-attacks, which will further threaten the availability and security of information. Therefore, securing the network infrastructure while protecting data from malicious or unauthorized devices/users become a vital aspect of communication network design.
The emerging blockchain technology, with the inherent decentralized consensus mechanism, provides a promising method to maintain a secure peer-to-peer network. By adopting the distributed consensus mechanism of blockchain, i.e. Proof of Work (PoW), trust relationships can be established among its members, even some of the entities may not be fully trusted. In the thesis, two types of IoT scenario are mainly investigated, namely, IoT routing protection and smart community device authentication.
For IoT routing protection, we propose a blockchain-based reputation management system in IoT networks to overcome the limitation of centralized router RM systems. More importantly, we develop an optimized group mining process for blockchain technique in order to improve the efficiency of block generation and reduce the resource consumption. The simulation results validate the distributed blockchain-based RM system in terms of attacks detection and system convergence performance, and the comparison result of the proposed group mining process with existing blockchain models illustrates the applicability and feasibility of the proposed works.
For smart community device authentication, we propose a novel sidechain-based authentication scheme for a smart community in order to overcome the limitations of existing approaches. To prevent the worthless information injection attack during the information sharing procedure, we also propose an optimized two-way peg protocol. Consequently, the simulation results prove the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of reducing authentication time, improving information management efficiency and decreasing storage consumption as compared to existing works, and the applicability and feasibility of the optimized two-way peg protocol have been approved.
Recommended Citation
Li, Min, "Blockchain-Based Distributed Network Architecture for Internet of Things" (2019). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 6768.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/6768
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.