Blockchain-Enabled Trust Management Framework for Internet of Things Environments

Abstract

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made it increasingly important to have secure and reliable trust management mechanisms that can support dynamic and decentralized network environments. Traditional trust management solutions often need centralized architectures that are vulnerable to a single point of failure, manipulation of trust and low scalability. While blockchain technology is a recently promising approach to providing decentralized IoT security, many current frameworks emphasize only the authentication or data integrity aspects of security, and offer limited assistance in evaluating the trust of a system continuously, and in updating it efficiently. In this paper, the authors introduce a new Blockchain-Enabled Trust Management Framework (BETMF) that combines the blockchain, smart contract and a lightweight trust evaluation mechanism to a consistent architecture in decentralized IoT environments. It proposes a framework that will continuously monitor device interactions, confirm trust updates by smart contracts and save validated trust records in the immutable trust ledger of the blockchain. In contrast to the other methods which involve merging several computational methods or complicated consensus protocols, BETMF implements a single consensus process for trust management, which enhances transparency, trust integrity, and scalability, with minimal computational costs. The suggested framework has been established in Python, and tested with a private Ethereum blockchain that was deployed using Ganache. Experimental results showed that the Trust Decision Accuracy was 97.8%, Precision was 97.3%, Recall was 96.9%, F1-score was 97.1%, the average latency of trust update was 18.6 ms, the average latency of access decision was 31.4 ms and the blockchain throughput was 132 transactions per second. The results show that the proposed framework can achieve a good balance of security, decentralization and operation efficiency in heterogeneous IoT environments. The prominent contribution of this work is the development of a lightweight blockchain based trust management framework that reduces the difficulty of trust evaluation, offers immutable trust storage, automated smart-contract based verification and generates efficient decentralized trust management for the next generation IoT applications.