There is no denying that we have stepped into the era of the Internet of Things with one foot, but there are still some obstacles to the other foot. The emergence of blockchain technology will promote the development of this process.
“Intelligent sound” “master hello, I am small Q, now is in the morning at 8:29, to work time!” “Intelligent door lock” “master you hurt me, you are always in such a hurry, next time hurriedly hemp walk son early up!” “There’s an ugly camera in front of you, telling you to slow down or I can’t save you!” “This is your favorite sandwich of the day. Enjoy it and start your day full of energy!”
People 50 years ago could not have imagined that people in the future would be so closely connected with so many small objects (intelligent terminal devices of the Internet of Things), such as cities, communities, homes, travel, medical treatment, payment… IoT devices are everywhere. At first, the concept of the Internet of Things came from Bill Gates’ book “The Future Road” (published in 1995). At that time, due to the immature ecological development of the Internet of Things such as sensor equipment, network and hardware, it was not paid attention to. Chinese Academy of Sciences also started the relevant research on “Sensor Network (Internet of Things)” as early as 1999. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) released the ITU Internet Report 2005: Internet of Things at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, formally putting forward the concept of “Internet of Things (IoT, Internet of Things)”.
Why is the Internet of Things so hot? Because the Internet of Things gives us a new dimension of information communication: Communication between the people and things, things and things, people and material – net 3 d integration mode of causing earth-shaking changes in our lives, the performance also is such, after 20 years of development, the Internet of things in the smart home, intelligent city, industrial iot, car networking, energy, health care and other industries, the equipment level scale has reached billions, the size of the market level trillions, Moreover, the application of the Internet of Things system has changed from closed-loop and fragmented to open, large-scale and intelligent…… Steering into the era of the Internet has brought us a rich and beautiful life. However, behind all these beautiful things, there are also many hidden dangers: security issues, mutual trust, expansion issues… In this article, we will take a look at the obstacles that are holding back the development of the Internet of Things.
Under the Internet of Things: Better Convenience comes with Higher Risk
The ecosystem of the Internet of Things system is usually divided into equipment service provider, business operator, security supervisor and user, etc. (Some equipment service providers and operation service providers are provided by one organization, for example, Coke Company sells Coke vending machines at the same time). Without loss of generality, the business platform of the Internet of Things under the ecology is usually used as the “central control brain” to connect and manage the Internet of Things applications, services, devices and data, and most of these business platform services are provided by the data center of the enterprise.
Fig. 1 Relationship chain of ecological roles in the traditional Internet of Things
However, in the process of multi-party operation and use, since the devices of the Internet of Things are often distributed at the edge of the network and the data are stored in the terminal devices, they rely on centralized services for unified processing, which will cause dual-end problems and risks of different degrees at the user end and server end:
Figure 2 Dual-ended risks of usage and service under traditional Internet of Things
Bring about using the
Are your IoT devices secure? The widespread application of the Internet of Things liberates manpower and improves efficiency, but at the same time, the unmanned operation gives malicious attackers an opportunity to become more vulnerable to botnets (unwittingly implanted botnets in Internet of Things devices). In addition, most user data is deposited in the terminal. If malicious attackers destroy the terminal equipment, steal, tamper and forge our information, or even the data center behind the operation is damaged, how should we deal with it?
Is your information privacy guaranteed? The core of the Internet of Things is tens of millions of users’ information and behavioral data. Due to the problems of numerous devices, scattered distribution and difficulty in supervision, personal privacy data are exposed to risks. Moreover, the centralized management structure cannot prove its innocence, and incidents of personal privacy data leakage occur from time to time.
Can the devices be trusted? At present, most of the Internet of Things are self-organizing networks within operators and enterprises. Involves across multiple operators, more than one peer collaboration between the main body, establish credit cost is very high, due to the cost of trust between users in different terminal equipment experience is relatively poor, and the equipment is behind the body for credible credible between problem, which can lead to produce a lot of cooperation in the process of actual operation costs.
Bring the service side
Expansion and performance of massive devices: Current Internet data streams are summary to the center of the single control system, in the near future, the Internet of things device of geometric will growth, achieve scale level, the centralized service cost burden, centralized fault handling, performance, how to ensure that will be a very thorny problem, need to find a way to reduce the cost of centralized broken.
Centralized service equipment island: according to incomplete statistics, the global Internet enterprises, tens of thousands of various IOT platform lack of unified technical standards and communication interface, the formation of the “equipment island” makes the users in the use of a number of hindering the IOT platform, at the same time the hindered the interconnection and sharing the economic development of all things.
Blockchain arrives: Make devices trusted, data secure, and value flow!
If there are obstacles, there will be a way to break through the obstacles and introduce our hero today: blockchain. Blockchain can help the Internet of Things to create a secure and trusted ecological closed loop from the device end to the server end: enabling the device to have a trusted identity, ensuring the security of the full data link, and promoting multi-party value collaboration!
Figure 3 Blockchain-based application architecture of the Internet of Things
Blockchain-based Internet of Things application architecture is a decentralized business platform. It changes from a centralized service mode to a multi-node distributed deployment service mode, which can be fault-tolerant and extended well. It can support a variety of distributed services and devices, such as IoT devices, IoT servers, IoT gateways, service gateways and end-user devices. Did distributed digital identity can be used to identify devices, and the same set of DID protocol can be used to break down barriers between devices. The business logic can be written on the chain in the form of smart contract for automatic execution. The mode is flexible, and it can effectively promote the cooperation between multiple devices, multiple roles and multiple institutions in the distributed mode. It can be said that it is a perfect match.
▲ Make the device have a trusted identity
The “Red, Yellow and Blue Kindergarten Child Abuse Incidents” in 2017 still makes people shudder in retrospect. At that time, the camera was destroyed, resulting in great resistance and disputes in the subsequent investigation and handling of the case. The same is true for other IoT devices. In the face of these intractable problems, blockchain can give each terminal device an “identity” by means of digital identity, that is, embedding a unique, physical-level and impregnable identity certificate in the internal security chip of its device, which can effectively prevent malicious nodes from accessing and doing evil. And the information transmitted through such a terminal device will have an “identity”, we can verify whether the identity of the authentication device is credible, verify whether the data is tampered with, so that there are problems with a target in sight, timely treatment.
Figure 4 Device flow and data flow under the Internet of Things scenario
▲ Ensuring data full link security
Solve the source problem of equipment, data full link security naturally cannot be ignored. In the ecological scenario of blockchain IoT, cryptographic privacy protection strategies such as digital signature, symmetric/asymmetric encryption, TEE, zero-knowledge proof, etc. will be adopted to encrypt data in the whole process of data collection (” the first kilometer “of data sources), transmission and storage. In addition, the special consensus mechanism and block chain storage structure of block chain are used to ensure data consistency and non-repudiation, which is helpful to build verifiable and traceable electronic evidence storage, so that users can feel at ease about information storage and use, and greatly improve the security of user data and privacy, so that the source can be checked, the whereabouts can be traced, and the responsibility can be investigated.
▲ Promote multi-stakeholder value collaboration
Different from other business scenarios, the Internet of Things has many participating roles, various devices and rich coverage scenarios. For any party, how to achieve multi-party cooperation, create maximum value with the lowest cost and provide high-quality services for users is a problem that every party needs to think about. In this regard, blockchain offers two medicine in terms of technical architecture and application services: “multicentralized service architecture” and “self-executing smart contract”. The polycentric nature of blockchain allows multiple participants to cooperate fairly, and enables a variety of devices and information to circulate in a unified blockchain network, which helps to break the shackles of multiple isolated information islands existing in the Internet of Things, build mutual trust at low cost, and promote the horizontal flow of information and value exchange. At the same time, the multi-level distributed architecture of blockchain also greatly reduces the high operation and maintenance costs of the centralized architecture.
The smart contract on the blockchain can well solve the problem of “disputes of interest” in multi-party cooperation. When you are in other platforms for content, services and products resources sold (such as the media, do consulting, charter/a wise), the right of voice and data in Taipei, how to make transparent the fashionable, dispute over how to deal with is a very thorny problem, difficult to tamper with, use its data block chain intelligent contract is not affected by human intervention in automatic features, Can way of collecting or contract written in business scenario intelligent contracts, if someone bought a bottle of water in the vending machine, produce in the deal, the chain will automatically run the smart contracts, the accounts in accordance with the agreement among stakeholders, and each party can query chain data, transparent separate accounting, put an end to fly and fraud.
This paper introduces the concept and problems of the Internet of Things, as well as the value and application of blockchain in combination with the Internet of Things. In the near future, QuChain Technology will explore more “blockchain + IoT” products in smart communities, smart cities, industrial Internet of Things, energy, medical and other industries, and help IoT development with the power of blockchain. From IoT (Internet of Things) to BOT (Blockchain of Things), follow us to help you step into the new era of intelligent Internet of Things built by Blockchain!
Want to know the difference between traditional IoT devices and “Blockchain + IoT” devices? Want to know how blockchain IoT ecological technology is designed? Welcome to continue to pay attention to the “block chain + IoT” series of follow-up tweets.
Li Shi, Product Leader of the Department of Fundamental Platform of Keynote Chain Technology, is responsible for the business related to the underlying products of blockchain and blockchain + IoT products
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