UAV-assisted Distributed Blockchain Technology to Secure the IoTs from DDoS

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of sensors and physical devices that are accessible through the Internet. Due to its greater potentials in the smart home and smart city, agriculture, transportation, the traditional centralized Internet may not be able to meet the IoT needs, for instance, security, scalability and trust among the devices. The blockchain technology may fulfil the gap to enable the peer-to-peer contractual behaviour without any third party to certify the IoT transactions. Therefore, the IoT challenges, such as scalability, single point of failure, reliability, time stamping, record and privacy can be tackled in a highly consistent way.

The IoT devices, which are normally battery powered, are very much primitive devices due to their size, energy availability and processing capacity. Therefore, very high energy efficient algorithm is needed to achieve a longer battery life. The security and privacy algorithm for data communication in a traditional network is less likely to be implemented in the IoT network. Even the blockchain technology or distributed ledger with highly complex security algorithm needs further investigation to be implemented in the IoT platform. In this project, the optimal distributed ledger for IoT has to be investigated.

Since the transmission range of IoT devices is relatively low due to constraint in transmit power budget, the network scalability issue can be tackled by using the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. The UAV-aided communication has been recently proposed for information dissemination, data collection and periodic sensing on the distributed IoT network platform, which improves the sensors’ operation power and prolongs the IoT network lifetime. Here, such drones can also be used for distributed blockchain and ledger management among the large network of IoTs. A framework for such technology is subject to further investigation.

Since IoT is a new type of network, IoT devices that can be controlled by a third party with the help of malicious apps or scripts or by cybercriminals to launch DDoS attacks. With IoT DDoS attacks becoming larger and more frequent than ever, it’s essential that businesses recognize the many risks associated with IoT devices and work to mitigate them before they’re exploited. The blockchain or distributed ledger technology not only increases the scalability of IoTs communication but also helps to identify the DDoS attack by observing the values and states of the smart contract provided by the IoT devices. In this project, various other methods of IoT security, drone-based blockchain technology and security issues will be explored.

At the end of the project, the student will be able to demonstrate the techniques to secure the IoTs network using the blockchain and UAV-assisted technologies from various security threats through the system design and high impact journal publications.