LegIoT: Ledgered Trust Management Platform for IoT

We investigate and address the currently unsolved problem of trust establishment in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) networks where heterogeneous devices and mutually mistrusting stakeholders are involved. We design, prototype and evaluate LegIoT, a novel, probabilistic trust management system that enables secure, dynamic and flexible (yet inexpensive) trust relationships in large IoT networks. The core component of LegIoT is a novel graph-based scheme that allows network devices (graph nodes) to re-use the already existing trust associations (graph edges) very efficiently; thus, significantly reducing the number of individually conducted trust assessments. Since no central trusted third party exists, LegIoT leverages Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to create and manage the trust relation graph in a decentralized manner. The trust assessment among devices can be instantiated by any appropriate assessment technique, for which we focus on remote attestation (integrity verification) in this paper. We prototyped LegIoT for Hyperledger Sawtooth and demonstrated through evaluation that the number of trust assessments in the network can be significantly reduced – e.g., by a factor of 20 for a network of 400 nodes and factor 5 for 1000 nodes.