TrustChain: Establishing Trust in the IoT-based Applications Ecosystem Using Blockchain

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already reshaped and transformed our lives in many ways, ranging from how we communicate with people or manage our health to how we drive our cars and manage our homes. With the rapid development of the IoT ecosystem in a wide range of applications, IoT devices and data are going to be traded as commodities in the marketplace in the near future, similar to cloud services or physical objects. Developing such a trading platform has previously been identified as one of the key grand challenges in the integration of IoT and data science. Deployment of such a platform raises concerns about the security and privacy of data and devices since their ownership is hard to trace and manage without a central trusted authority. A central trusted authority is not a viable solution for a fully decentralized and distributed IoT ecosystem with a large number of distributed device vendors and consumers. Blockchain, as a decentralized system, removes the requirement for a trusted third-party by allowing participants to verify data correctness and ensure its immutability. IoT devices can use blockchain to register themselves and organize, store, and share streams of data effectively and reliably. We demonstrate the applicability of blockchain to IoT devices and data management with an aim of providing end-to-end trust for trading. We also give a brief introduction to the topics and challenges for future research toward developing a trustworthy trading platform for IoT ecosystems.