Distributed Ledger Technology for Securing IoT

Computing and communication are getting increasingly ubiquitous with the inclusion of sophisticated devices like electric vehicles, smart phones and other house hold appliances. Due to the constant evolution in Internet of Things (IoT), the process of collaboration of these devices at a mass scale in order to provide improved and better services to the society. Traditional mechanisms which are used to sustain privacy and security become incapable from achieving the same for IoT systems having distributed or decentralized topology. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), an emerging digital technology, consists of different kinds of decentralized data structures to ensure immutability by linking blocks using cryptographic measures. DLT has the ability to ensure privacy, security and distributed or decentralized computations with adhering to the constraints of IoT nodes. This study is motivated due to the lack of an in-depth analysis on how the characteristics of DLT can be exploited to secure IoT systems. So, an in depth overview of DLT along with some of the existing solutions to meet security requirements of IoT systems employing DLT have been provided in this paper. With respect to integrating DLT with IoT, this article also highlights the different challenges.