Enhancing Trust in Devices and Transactions of the Internet of Things
Licentiate thesis, 2020

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of smart embedded devices will interact frequently.
These interactions will produce billions of transactions.
With IoT, users can utilize their phones, home appliances, wearables, or any other wireless embedded device to conduct transactions.
For example, a smart car and a parking lot can utilize their sensors to negotiate the fees of a parking spot.
The success of IoT applications highly depends on the ability of wireless embedded devices to cope with a large number of transactions.
However, these devices face significant constraints in terms of memory, computation, and energy capacity.


With our work, we target the challenges of accurately recording IoT transactions from resource-constrained devices. We identify three domain-problems: a) malicious software modification, b) non-repudiation of IoT transactions, and c) inability of IoT transactions to include sensors readings and actuators.
The motivation comes from two key factors.
First, with Internet connectivity, IoT devices are exposed to cyber-attacks.
Internet connectivity makes it possible for malicious users to find ways to connect and modify the software of a device.
Second, we need to store transactions from IoT devices that are owned or operated by different stakeholders.


The thesis includes three papers. In the first paper, we perform an empirical evaluation of Secure Boot on embedded devices.
In the second paper, we propose IoTLogBlock, an architecture to record off-line transactions of IoT devices.
In the third paper, we propose TinyEVM, an architecture to execute off-chain smart contracts on IoT devices with an ability to include sensor readings and actuators as part of IoT transactions.

Secure Boot

Distributed Systems

Blockchain

Embedded Systems

Smart Contracts

Internet of Things

Online
Opponent: Prof. Raja Jurdak, School of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Author

Christos Profentzas

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Performance of Secure Boot in Embedded Systems

Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS),; (2019)p. 198-204

Paper in proceeding

TinyEVM: Off-Chain Smart Contracts on Low-Power IoT Devices

40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems,; (2020)p. 507-518

Paper in proceeding

IoTLogBlock: Recording Off-line Transactions of Low-Power IoT Devices Using a Blockchain

Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN),; (2019)

Paper in proceeding

KIDSAM: Knowledge and information-sharing in digital collaborative projects

VINNOVA (2018-03966), 2018-11-01 -- 2021-11-30.

RIOT: Resilient Internet of Things

Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB2018-12526), 2019-01-01 -- 2023-12-31.

AgreeOnIT: Lightweight Consensus and Distributed Computing in the Resource-Constrained Internet of Things

Swedish Research Council (VR) (37200024), 2019-01-01 -- 2022-12-31.

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Communication Systems

Embedded Systems

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Technical report - Department of Computing Science, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University: 210L

Publisher

Chalmers

Online

Online

Opponent: Prof. Raja Jurdak, School of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

More information

Latest update

9/22/2020