Decentralized Web of Trust and Authentication for the Internet of Things

As the Internet of Thing (IoT) matures, a lot of concerns are being raised about security, privacy and interoperability. The Web of Things (WoT) model leverages web technologies to improve interoperability. Due to its distributed components, the web scaled well beyond initial expectations. Still, secure authentication and communication across organization boundaries rely on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which is a non-transparent, centralized single point of failure. We can improve transparency and reduce the chain of trust--thus significantly improving the IoT security--by empowering blockchain technology and web security standards. In this paper, we build a scalable, decentralized IoT-centric PKI and discuss how we can combine it with the emerging web authentication and authorization framework for constrained environments.