Smart contract based policies for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most powerful platforms that incorporates several other technological components within itself. The IoT ecosystem comprises devices, communications, protocols, analytics, cloud, automation, etc. Its magnitude keeps on increasing with the addition of tools and services. While IoT has many advantages like connectivity, efficiency, and convenience, it is a known fact that privacy and security issues are prevalent in the IoT network. To minimize the security and privacy issues, we propose a blockchain-based solution. In this paper, we design policies based on smart contacts, which is a self-enforcing agreement embedded in computer code managed by a blockchain. We propose three different policies: Hardware and Device Security Policies, Access and Authentication policies, and Application security for the IoT network. Since blockchain-based solutions ensure trust and stability, this may be one of the most robust techniques to alleviate the IoT network’s security and privacy issues. Also, we calculate the throughput and latency of the IoT enabled blockchain network and compare the power consumption of the IoT device at the time of data request with other proposed systems.