A blockchain-based trust management method for Internet of Things

Abstract In Internet of things (IoT), one of the main concepts is wireless sensor networks where there are a large of resource-constrained sensor nodes. With the wide application of Internet of things (IoT), these resource-constrained sensor nodes have to suffer from more security threats. One of possible solutions is to establish a trustworthy IoT environment where the interactions are based on the trustworthiness of sensor nodes. More and more scholars focus on studying trust management and trust evaluation in IoT, but there is few research in ensuring that the feedbacks used in the trust evaluating process is trustworthy. Furthermore, a resource-constrained IoT node does not have enough memory to satisfy the usage of trust computation and maintenance. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a blockchain-based trust management mechanism (BBTM), where the trustworthiness of sensor nodes will be evaluated by the mobile edge nodes. BBTM can create smart contracts for trust computation and verify the computation process. We analyze BBTM performance in terms of trust accuracy, convergence, and resiliency against attacks. In addition, we also compare BBTM with other methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.