Name of the participant: Seema Kumar
Description of the IT-research project: Blockchain technology can be used to manage billions of IoT devices and their data, all in a secured and resilient manner. In order to verify the validity of a blockchain, large resources in terms of processing power and storage are required. Currently, general-purpose computers and servers are equipped with such resources. Very few attempts have been made to enable resource-constrained devices to validate blockchains with limited security guarantees. In this project, we aim to implement an end-to-end, deployable blockchain-based IoT system with lightweight validation rules applicable to non-monetary applications and IoT-centric consensus protocol. The main challenges in building such a system is to keep the communication overhead and energy consumption at a minimum when resource-constrained devices are communicating with blockchain nodes. The proposed system should ideally be able to perform with full capabilities under minimal trust model. As part of this project, we study, investigate and explore the feasibility of a lightweight blockchain for IoT applications in order to manage data and ensure its privacy.
In this project we consider two different types of deployment settings. First is an “in- device” blockchain that allows resource-constrained devices to verify and validate a blockchain. Also, the extent of security and storage that can be ensured in such a scenario will be investigated. A second “out-of-device” blockchain is considered that allows the end-devices to act as client nodes only, whereas the blockchain is itself stored, verified and maintained by backend nodes. The existing solutions for “out-of- device” blockchain will be studied to evaluate their applicability to the lightweight nodes.
Software Campus partners: TU Darmstadt, Huawei
Implementation period: 01.01.2020 – 31.12.2021