Blockchain: the IoT companion
Somewhere and somewhat we’re quite obsessed with being smart to smarter. And to be that IoT comes as a blessing. Internet has come into the picture now not only for connecting people but also connecting devices i.e smart devices. Sophisticated chips, actuators, sensors are embedded into these devices so that the data can be transferred to the IoT network. The high analytics capability of IoT is leading to new ways of impacting business processes.
But while talking about data, security comes as a major concern. Like it was just a few months ago, when whatsapp changed it’s privacy policy, people had become quite anxious about that. Same way if our day to day routine become accessible to a number of people just because of those IoT devices, it won’t be a thing to be cherished. According to statistics it is assumed that 75.44 billion IoT devices will be projected by 2025. Insecured IoT devices are easy targets for those cyber criminals just by launching DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
Not only the security, current centralized systems can also cause the issue with scalability with IoT networks. As the number of devices connected to the Central system is growing higher, necessity of handling larger and larger amount of data is also increasing. In that case, if due to some glitch, central server goes down the entire network will fall apart. But as day by day IoT devices are becoming part of our daily lives and rate of that is also increasing exponentially, it has become a need to address the security and scalability issues.
Just at this point, Blockchain Technology or Distributed Ledger Technology(DLT) comes into frame. The unique capabilities of Blockchain can be saviour for IoT network issues. Blockchain system consists of a distributed digital ledger, shared among participants in the system. The transactions or events once recorded in the ledger can not be modified or removed.
Blockchain: as a Saviour of IoT:
IoT’s centralized client server model is managed by a single authority that makes it keen to single point failure. Blockchain address this issue by it’s decentralized working architecture. So blockchain can be the saviour of IoT in following ways-
1. Because of Blockchain’s decentralized structure it is quite impossible to overwrite existing IoT data records. Thus blockchain’s robust level of encryption, adds another security layer that is hard for those hackers to bypass and access data.
2. Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology provides a fast support to process transactions even though the number of connected devices are huge.
3. Blockchain provides transparency. The authorized persons can access the network to track past transactions. Thus it enables a trustworthy path to identify if there’s any data leakage or not.
4. Next, the distributed ledger technology of blockchain is tamper-proof. So it doesn’t need any third party involvement. As no single organisation has access to the whole data, it increases the security level of IoT network data.
-As a overview it’s quite clear that blockchain can be a solution of IoT networks’s issues but no technology comes as a full proofed solution. Further discussion and implementation is also a need.
