On-Off Attack on a Blockchain-based IoT System

There is a growing interest in using the Blockchain for resolving IoT security and trustworthiness issues existing in today's complex systems. Blockchain concerns trust in peer to peer networks by providing a distributed tamper-resistant ledger. However, the combination of these two emerging technologies might create new problems and vulnerabilities that attackers might abuse. In this paper, we aim to investigate the trust mechanism of Lightweight Scalable BlockChain (LSB), that is a Blockchain specifically designed for Internet of Things networks, to show that a malicious participant in a Blockchain architecture have possibility to pursue an On-Off attack and downgrade the integrity of the distributed ledger. We choose a remote software update process as an instance to represent this violation. Finally, using the actor-based language Rebeca, we provide a model of a system under attack and verify the described attack scenario.