Abstract

The IoT market is continuously expanding, and security measures parallel to the growing industrialization has drawn the research community’s attention. While several works have focused on the different technologies used to protect IoT devices, this paper aims to narrow the focus to Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for security and privacy issues faced by these devices. These technologies address two major vulnerabilities with edge devices on IoT networks: centralization and weak edge nodes. Blockchain provides a distributed system that can help avoid a single-point failure and can be used to optimize battery life on low-level devices by load balancing. On the other hand, AI’s power to learn and adapt is critical to automate systems and make them intelligent enough to analyze collected data. The combination of these two technologies is capable of mitigating multiple challenges IoT architectures face currently. The paper discusses the latest major architectures that integrate Blockchain and AI to enhance security within the. This paper also presents the comprehensive take on the device security and drawbacks to these mechanisms. This work also addresses the future of security in IoT and suggests different areas that need further work to better comprehend how the combination of these technologies can assist in enhancing security.

INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) market, a network of devices that communicate and exchange data with each other, has expanded over the last decade. IoT devices provide different applications such as health care, smart homes, wearables, and smart cities. The advent of a wide range of devices requires security that matches its capabilities to ensure the safety of the system and network. The number and type of attacks carried out against IoT devices have increased exponentially. As the need for faster and more efficient devices increases, there is a lag in equal breakthroughs in IoT security. According to Business Insider’s 2020 IoT research, IoT devices are predicted to increase to 41 billion by 2027 [1].

In order to meet this challenge, we must focus on the security strategies that match IoT devices’ hardware and computational power to minimize internal or outsider attacks.

CONCLUSION

This paper defined the role that AI/ML and Blockchain have currently in IoT devices, explaining in detail how Blockchain technology works and how AI/ML is used to lessen the computational load on IoT devices. We then talked about Blockchain and AI/ML in IoT security and how having these technologies strengthens privacy, data integrity, and data processing. Four potential solutions were explored and analyzed to understand how they could help deficiencies in the current IoT network setup as well as challenges that were not addressed in the solutions. Finally, future lanes of research were brought up for researchers to study.

This paper presented the role that AI/ML and Blockchain have currently in IoT devices and how these two can work in tandem to lessen the computational load on IoT devices. The paper then discussed the scope of Blockchain and AI/ML in IoT security towards strengthening privacy, data integrity, and data processing. Then it addresses the vulnerabilities and feasibility of AI/ML and Blockchain towards IoT security. With several potential solutions, four major works were studied. The paper then progresses to analyze these works on several parameters, summarizing them based on their: 1) Feasibility, 2) Security Strength, 3) Applicability and 4) Robustness.