IoTBChain: Adopting Blockchain Technology to Increase PLC Resilience in an IoT Environment

Abstract

The networks on a centralized cloud architecture that interconnect Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets are not limited by national or jurisdictional borders. To ensure the secure sharing of sensitive user data among IoT gadgets, it is imperative to maintain security, resilience and trustless authentication. As a result, blockchain technology has become a viable option to provide such noteworthy characteristics. Blockchain technology is foundational for resolving many IoT security and privacy issues. Blockchain’s safe decentralization can solve the IoT ecosystem’s security, authentication and maintenance constraints. However, blockchain, like any innovation, has drawbacks, mainly when used in crucial IoT systems such as programmable logic controller (PLC) networks. This paper addresses the most recent security and privacy issues relating to the IoT, including the perception, network and application layers of the IoT’s tiered architecture. The key focus is to review the existing IoT security and privacy concerns and how blockchain might be used to deal with these problems. This paper proposes a novel approach focusing on IoT capabilities and PLC device security. The new model will incorporate a proof-of-work-based blockchain into the (PLC) IoT ecosystem. This blockchain enables the transmission of binary data and the data logging of the (PLC) networks’ signals. This novel technique uses fewer resources than other sophisticated methods in that PLC devices communicate data while maintaining a high transmission, encryption and decoding speed. In addition to ensuring repeatability, our new model addresses the memory and tracing problems that different PLC manufacturers encounter.