Blockchain-Based Security Layer for Identification and Isolation of Malicious Things in IoT: A Conceptual Design

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is increasingly becoming the norm in both civilian and military settings. In this paper, we present a comprehensive security abstraction layer for IoT systems based on blockchain, which provides us a logical view of a system that comprises trusted devices. The goal of the proposed layer is to detect and isolate untrusted devices. The proposed abstraction layer provides three services, namely: authorization, authentication, and auditing by using blockchain and smart contract-based approaches. We adopt a hardware based approach, where dedicated hardware modules are used to monitor the behavior of the firmware without incurring excessive performance overhead.