Energy-Efficient Data Anchoring for IoT Devices

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), device-generated data has surged significantly. These ever increasing volumes of data need to be trusted and relied on for various purposes. Data consumers heavily depend on the correctness and integrity of the generated data sets, whereas inadequate IoT security measures increase the risk of data contamination. While data quality problems due to technical issues like sensor faults, unstable communication links, and storage failures can be mitigated with simple measures like redundant nodes and checksums, protection against arbitrary attacks by hackers or insiders requires more sophisticated mechanisms. Blockchain technology enables such an integrity protection mechanism as data is stored in a distributed ledger that cannot be controlled by a single entity. However, the main challenge of this approach in the context of resource-constrained IoT devices lies in the potentially high computational overhead of the underlying cryptographic operations as well as additional storage and bandwidth requirements. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy-efficient data anchoring method tailored for IoT sensors that provides end-to-end security guarantees using a combination of advanced hash trees and digital signatures. By checking the corresponding ledger transaction, any interested party can verify the authenticity of arbitrary sensor data items that were shared by the responsible data provider. Our experiments show a negligible energy overhead for sensor nodes compared to the unprotected protocol, thus indicating the practical feasibility of the approach.