Biblio

One of the biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) is to bridge the currently fragmented trust domains. The traditional PKI model relies on a common root of trust and does not fit well with the heterogeneous IoT ecosystem where constrained devices belong to independent administrative domains. In this work we describe a distributed trust model for the IoT that leverages the existing trust domains and bridges them to create end-to-end trust between IoT devices without relying on any common root of trust. Furthermore we define a new cryptographic primitive, denoted as obligation chain designed as a credit-based Blockchain with a built-in reputation mechanism. Its innovative design enables a wide range of use cases and business models that are simply not possible with current Blockchain-based solutions while not experiencing traditional blockchain delays. We provide a security analysis for both the obligation chain and the overall architecture and provide experimental tests that show its viability and quality.