Reliable Services from Service Providers Based on the Ratings of IoT Devices Using Blockchain

The communication between the Internet of Things (IoTs) devices is not secure and reliable. A large number of security risks are involved. The existing security mechanisms are not easy to manage because they require extra resources and thus, increase the overall cost of the system. The IoT devices are resource-limited devices and they do not perform many computation. The services requested from the IoT devices may be malicious and may have severe consequences when they are not being tackled by any efficient security mechanism. The reliability of the services is an important aspect of the IoT network. Blockchain provides a solution that is secure and effective in terms of reliability and cost. We have proposed a system model through which we protect the IoT devices from unreliable services. These services are provided by cloud service providers. The proposed system allows IoT devices to know about the ratings of the service providers before requesting the service. Smart contracts are introduced to store ratings of the service providers into the blockchain. IoT devices invoke the smart contract to acquire ratings of the service providers by providing service codes. Performance analysis and the experimental results show that the proposed model protects the IoT devices from unreliable services in a reasonable time and affordable cost.