Decentralizing IoT Management Systems Using Blockchain for Censorship Resistance

Blockchain technology has been increasingly used for decentralizing cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) architectures to address limitations faced by centralized systems. While many existing efforts are successful in decentralization with multiple servers (i.e., full nodes) to handle faulty nodes, an important issue has arisen that external clients have to rely on a relay node to communicate with the full nodes in the blockchain. Compromization of such relay nodes may result in a security breach and even a blockage of IoT sensors from the network. In this article, we propose blockchain-based decentralized IoT management systems for censorship resistance, which include a “diffusion” function to deliver all messages from sensors to all full nodes and an augmented consensus protocol to check data losses, replicate processing outcome, and facilitate opportunistic outcome delivery. We also leverage public key aggregation to reduce communication complexity and signature verification. The experimental results from proof-of-concept implementation and deployment in a real distributed environment show the feasibility and effectiveness in achieving censorship resistance.