Biblio

Thanks to its decentralized structure and immutability, blockchain technology has the potential to address relevant security and privacy challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, by hosting and executing smart contracts, blockchain allows secure, flexible, and traceable message communication between IoT devices. The unique characteristics of IoT systems, such as heterogeneity and pervasiveness, however, pose challenges in designing smart contracts for such systems. In this paper, we study these challenges and propose a design approach for smart contracts used in IoT systems. The main goal of our design model is to enhance the development of IoT smart contracts based on the inherent pervasive attributes of IoT systems. In particular, the design model allows the smart contracts to encapsulate functionalities such as contractlevel communication between IoT devices, access to data-sources within contracts, and interoperability of heterogeneous IoT smart contracts. The essence of our approach is structuring the design of IoT smart contracts as self-contained software services, inspired by the microservice architecture model. The flexibility, scalability and modularity of this model make it an efficient approach for developing pervasive IoT smart contracts.

Local-area networks comprising the Internet of Things (IoT) consist mainly of devices that have limited processing capabilities and face energy constraints. This has an implication on developing security mechanisms, as they require significant computing resources. In this paper, we design a trust-based routing solution with IoT devices in mind. Specifically, we propose a trust-based approach for managing the reputation of every node of an IoT network. The approach is based on the emerging Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL). The proposed solution is simulated for its routing resilience and compared with two other variants of RPL.