The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is widely employed in several fields, such as smart cities, intelligent transportation systems, smart power grids, smart homes, and digital healthcare solutions, to enhance the quality of life, promote sustainability, and foster social interactions. The significant challenges related to IoT encompass the legitimacy verification of intelligent devices, handling cryptographic keys for edge devices with limited resources, guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted IoT data, and securely storing that data in the cloud system. The Blockchain system, characterized by its distributed, decentralized, and irreversible ledger, has gained recognition for its efficacy in ensuring security for sensitive smart home applications. This paper presents a comprehensive security solution for smart homes, comprising smart sensor authentication, key management, data confidentiality, data integrity, secure storage, and access control for cloud-based data. A robust and secure end-to-end structure for smart homes is developed in two phases. During the initial stage, a private Blockchain system is established on the fog nodes to facilitate the authentication and access control mechanisms for smart home edge devices. This private Blockchain can distribute and manage keys, enabling it to securely transfer data from intelligent sensors to the cloud environment using fog nodes. A consortium Blockchain is established during the next phase to simulate the cloud service providers. This Blockchain enables the provision of secured storage and data access control within the cloud, enhancing secure cloud storage even in a hostile environment. The novel contribution of this article relies on the integration of private and consortium Blockchain networks with a streamlined collaboration. This amalgamation achieves the efficient and distributed control of multiple Blockchain validators. A secure prototype has been developed to visualize and engage with a smart home environment. This prototype effectively displays data using various graphical and interactive techniques. The performance metrics, including attack resilience, latency and throughput of the network proves the efficiency of proposed framework as compared to state-of-the-art works. In future, we focus on the cross-chain interactions in multi-Blockchain environments and address the existing limitations such as inconsistencies, interoperability issues, and inefficient security measures.

The internet of things (IoT) comprises billions of devices that communicate and exchange data through the internet. However, managing each device's registration, identification, and authentication information is challenging. In this paper, we have leveraged the efficient management of the self-sovereign identity of IoT devices using the blockchain network called 'know your device'. The blockchain validators act as identity-verifiers for the authenticated IoT devices through threshold-based signatures. The verifiers are elected in each tenure by a lightweight proof-of-voting consensus algorithm. As the off-chain mechanism, the interplanetary file system (IPFS) stores the registered IoT devices' identities and authentication credentials. We have performed the experimental result analysis of the proposed scheme on Hyperledger Fabric. Privacy, anonymity, and accountability are significant achievements of the proposed scheme. The results have proven the efficiency of our scheme in terms of lower execution time, lower smart contract deployment time, and higher transaction throughput than the state-of-the-art techniques.

In the day-to-day deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), IPv6-over-Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices became significant enablers due to their low power, low range, and effortless connectivity. To overcome the latency during BLE device migration, we have proposed a Blockchain-based resilient pairing and bonding of BLE devices using a lightweight authenticated encryption scheme. The bonding information is stored on the local ledger of the intermediate IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) for BLE (6LoWPAN for BLE or 6LoWBLE) over gateway. Whenever the BLE device migrates from one gateway to another, the bonding information is transferred to the local ledger of the current gateway through the global ledger with the Proof-of-Voting consensus algorithm. The resilience of the proposed authentication scheme is analyzed using BAN logic. In addition, we proposed a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) detection framework using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) due to the escalation of MITM attacks on BLE devices. The DRL-based model is implemented in Python, and its performance is evaluated using the Kitsune Network Attack Dataset. The performance of the overall framework is tested on the Hyperledger Fabric, which results in low latency and a low average pairing time in comparison with existing frameworks

Routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) is a routing protocol for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) network devices. RPL has become a widely adopted protocol for routing in low-powered device networks. However, it lacks essential security features, including end-to-end security, robust authentication, and intrusion detection capabilities. Blockchain is a decentralized and immutable digital ledger that records transactions across multiple computers. It provides privacy, transparency, security, and trust. In this work, we proposed a blockchain-based reliable RPL protocol called reliable-RPL, which uses node reliability, link reliability, and relative trust scores of RPL-enabled IoT devices. The parent selection and network topology formulation are based on the proposed reliability-aware objective function. A lightweight ECC-based scheme performs registration, identification, and authentication of RPL-enabled IoT devices. The consistent topological updates from these authenticated IoT devices are used to secure routing paths in RPL-enabled networks. Using a modified trickle algorithm, we employed a reputation-based trust system that monitors and labels malicious nodes based on their reliable activities. The novelty of the proposed framework relies on integrating Contiki-NG (as fronted for IoT network simulation) and Hyperledger Fabric (as a backend for blockchain-based device authentication and trust-based attack resilience regarding rank, replay, sinkhole, and route poisoning attacks). The experimental evaluation of reliable-RPL has demonstrated its effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods regarding significant performance metrics, including packet loss, routing overhead, and throughput on Hyperledger Caliper.

The widespread adoption of cloud storage enables users to remotely access resources through a self-service model. Utilizing pay-per-use storage services provided by cloud service providers (CSPs) requires users to commit financially to their resources. This paper introduces a Secure Cloud Storage (SCS) framework, offering a secure architecture for cloud storage using a consortium blockchain network to address trust issues. This framework substitutes the third-party auditor with peers of a consortium blockchain network, which handles the role of data storage and verification. Storage space is divided into uncommitted and committed segments. Uncommitted storage is used for storing unverified documents, while committed storage is reserved for documents that have been validated through a consensus mechanism. In contrast, committed storage is des-ignated for the storage of committed documents. Documents validated by a consensus threshold of peer nodes are moved from uncommitted to committed storage. The implementation of the SCS framework is conducted using Hyperledger Fabric, a modular blockchain platform optimized for permissioned networks. The security analysis demonstrates that SCS effectively protects cloud storage against attacks, including unauthorized access attacks, data integrity attacks, and malicious server attacks, while maintaining data integrity and auditability. The performance evaluation shows that document upload and retrieval times, block acceptance, execution times, and latency are all improved compared to state-of-the-art cloud storage techniques