Securing Digital Ledger Technologies-Enabled IoT Devices: Taxonomy, Challenges, and Solutions

With the faster maturity and stability of digitization, connectivity and edge technologies, the number of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors is flourishing fast in important junctions such as homes, hotels, hospitals, retail stores, manufacturing floors, railway stations, airports, oil wells, warehouses, etc. However, in this extremely connected world, the security implications for IoT devices are getting worse with the constant rise in malicious cyberattacks. The challenge is how to secure IoT sensors, services and data. The blockchain technology, a prominent distributed ledger technology (DLT), is being pronounced as the way forward for safeguarding IoT devices and data. The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based DLT has the inherent potential to realize the benefits of blockchain with better performance. IOTA is a DAG-based blockchain implementation for the IoT era. The Tangle, the IOTA’s network immutably records the exchange of data and value. It ensures that the information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with nor destroyed. In this work, we depict a thorough analysis of the existing security studies for IOTA. Then, we identify the gaps and the limitations of these security solution schemes, and finally, propose future security research recommendations that can potentially fill these gaps to secure DLT-enabled IoT devices.