Embedding Blockchain Technology into IoT for Security: A Survey

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made great progress. The interconnection between IoT and the Internet enables real-time information processing and transaction implementation through heterogeneous intelligent devices. But the security, the privacy, and the reliability of IoT are key challenges that limit its development. The features of blockchain, such as decentralization, consensus mechanism, data encryption, and smart contracts, are suitable for building distributed IoT systems to prevent potential attacks and to reduce transaction costs. As a decentralized and transparent database platform, blockchain has the potential to raise the performance of IoT security to a higher level. This paper systematically analyzes state-of-the-art of IoT security based on blockchain, paying special attention to the security features, issues, technologies, approaches, and related scenarios in blockchain-embedded IoT. The integration and interoperation of blockchain and IoT is an important and foreseeable development in computational communication system.