Biblio

The Internet of Things poses some of the biggest security challenges in the present day. Companies, users and infrastructures are constantly under attack by malicious actors. Increasingly, attacks are being launched by hacking into one vulnerable device and hence disabling entire networks resulting in great loss. A strong identity management framework can help better protect these devices by issuing a unique identity and managing the same through its lifecycle. Identity of Things (IDoT) is a term that has been used to describe the importance of device identities in IoT networks. Since the traditional identity and access management (IAM) solutions are inadequate in managing identities for IoT, the Identity of Things (IDoT) is emerging as the solution for issuance of Identities to every type of device within the IoT IAM infrastructure. This paper presents the survey of recent research works proposed in the area of device identities and various commercial solutions offered by organizations specializing in IoT device security.

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems' decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.