Blockchain and IoT: Why They Are The Ideal Match

After almost two decades of revolutionizing sprint, phones are hitting the saturation point and the curve of innovation now seems to be approaching towards IoT. Though it has proved to have immense potential in almost every sphere of life, the progress has been sluggish as compared to initial expectations. From smart homes to smart cities to efficient and transparent workplaces and industries, there is no doubt over what IoTs can make do., It’s just to ensure that if it can make them happen in a secure environment.

Yes, no technology is bulletproof but the fact that IoT devices are essentially just a set of sensors with limited computing power- operating in most sensitive of places, certainly amplifies the risks involved. After all, though hacking your smart toaster to burn the bread is most unlikely, crippling the entire city by breaching its power or traffic system is a real possibility. This is the reason why despite having immense benefits to offer, businesses remain apprehensive about its full-fledged adoption.

In the meantime, a different technology- Blockchain, has made quite a stir in the financial sector that researchers believe also holds the key to the security woes of many other domains, including mobile app development services. You might have heard of them in cryptocurrencies and how it makes them virtually impossible to counterfeit or carry fraudulent transactions.

To express in the simplest terms, Blockchain is a peer-to-peer network that maintains data in a distributed manner. Every time, an event takes place, all get separately registered it in their own ledger. That is, it employs high level of redundancy, and distribution minimizes the corruption of actual data. Because the same data is independently stored at various locations by various systems, the attacker would need to compromise them all to be able to compromise the data, or at least more than half- that we will explain later. 

The common ground:

Authentic data stream

As Blockchain works on a peer-to-peer network, there is no central authority to certify the authenticity of data and thus, no place to centrally corrupt it. Each device works with other in its own encryption and maintains a separate log. This means, even if the attack injects an instruction or device in the network, no device will be able to recognize it and damage will be averted.

Decentralized

The biggest challenge that the architects of smart cities and other automated ecosystems face is that it remains only as secure as its weakest link. After all, if a single device in the system goes rogue, it has the potential to compromise the entire system. The Blockchain, as you now know, departs from the traditional client-server model and uses a highly decentralized and distributed system. So, even if one or an entire cluster of devices gets compromised, the damage will be mostly contained because rest of the system will automatically isolate based on the above-mentioned reason. The only way to bypass this hurdle for the attackers is to compromise at least 51% of the devices in the system- which in itself is a very unlikely event.

Blockchain manages to overcome two of the most serious threats that IoT face, yet it doesn’t mean the entire ecosystem becomes bulletproof, partially because no technology ever is. There are still a lot of questions unanswered for IoT app development, Blockchain lends it a solid ground upon which it can fail and flourish to become the mainstream technology of the future.