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How Blockchain Tech can benefit the IoT?
How Blockchain Tech can benefit the IoT?

June 8, 2021

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Blockchain technology has already gone through a peak of hype, then a period of disillusionment, but it may be on an upward climb again.

While the roller-coaster ride of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have also cast aspersions on blockchain technology –and it has—recent events such as COVID-19 and its impact on the connected economy has created new imperatives for digitizing transactions .

Enter blockchain, a digital ledger technology that enables organizations to transact digitally, recording these transactions securely, immutably across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network.

Indeed, recent events such as the advent of COVID-19 brought blockchain to the forefront, as social distancing and reduced labor forces on-site accelerated digital trends.

How Blockchain Technology Works

The three fundamental properties of blockchain technology as a data structure ( i.e., distribution, immutability and decentralization, can benefit the Internet of Things (IoT).

How these properties can benefit the IoT ecosystem can be understood by considering surveillance cameras as IoT devices.

Say a burglar is planning a sophisticated act on a high-profile target. To prevent the act from being recorded, the burglar can first attack the server running the database where the videos are stored.

The distributed aspect of blockchain means that data are replicated across several computers. This fact makes the hacking more challenging since there are now several target devices.

The redundancy in storage brought by blockchain technology brings extra security and enhances data access since users in IoT ecosystems can submit to and retrieve their data from different devices.

Continuing with this example, say the burglar is captured and claims in court that the recorded video is forged evidence. The immutability nature of blockchain technology means that any change to the stored data can be easily detected. Thus, the burglar’s claim can be verified by looking at attempts to tamper with the data.

However, the decentralization aspect of blockchain technology can be a major issue when storing data from IoT devices. Decentralization means that the computers used to store data [in a distributed fashion] might belong to different entities

A different possibility when using blockchain in the IoT context is to store access logs and permissions. Specifically, the distributed and decentralization aspects of blockchain make it notoriously expensive to store big data. An alternative is to keep the data in a central repository while storing logs concerning access to the data using blockchain technology.

Thereafter, users have an immutable data structure that can tell who accessed their data and when that happened. Going one step further, blockchain technology can be used to store data access permissions issued by users.

Now, users and data requesters have an immutable database that can unequivocally determine who has access to specific data and for long that access is valid. This application has a great potential to enhance privacy and even be the backbone of a data marketplace where users can profit from selling their own data.

The Benefits of Blockchain and IoT

A blockchain’s distributed ledger is tamper-proof, eliminating the need for the involved parties to trust one another. As such, no single party has control over the massive amount of data the IoT devices generate. Blockchain encryption makes it virtually impossible for anyone to overwrite existing data records. And using blockchain to store IoT data adds another layer of security to prevent malicious attackers from gaining access to the network.

A primary challenge for IoT players is to protect the information in the entire IoT ecosystem. Security vulnerabilities make IoT devices an easy target for distributed-denial-of-service attacks, malicious attackers and data breaches.

The integration of IoT and blockchain opens the door for new possibilities that inherently reduce inefficiencies, enhance security and improve transparency for all involved parties while enabling secured machine-to-machine transactions. The coupling of these technologies allows a physical asset to be tracked from the moment raw materials are mined, for example, and among every step of the supply chain until it is with the end consumer.


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RohitKaul

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