Research on CoAP Resource Directory Based on Blockchain

The security of the Internet of things(IoT) has become a very critical and sensitive issue. In the limited network based on COAP, due to the limited ability of nodes and the lack of reliable authentication and access control mechanism in the Resource Directory (RD), devices are easy to be attacked and cause data leakage. This paper proposes a method to enhance the security of COAP nodes by using blockchain. By extending the business capability of the CoAP RD, the semantics of the security attributes are added; and a security service access agent is defined to be responsible for the blockchain operation; the RD can be involved in the authentication/access control of the blockchain when the CoAP node resource access is parsed. The CoAP node can transfer the device and service data to the blockchain for secure storage. In this paper, the Californium COAP framework and Ethereum are used as the verification platform to realize the software and security service access agent software that extend the RD security semantics. The authentication / access control is carried out in combination with the blockchain, and the COAP node provides the security storage capacity in combination with the blockchain. The work of this paper shows that it is feasible to use blockchain technology to improve the security capability of COAP nodes in the IoT.