Highly Reliable IoT Data Management Platform Using Blockchain and Transaction Data Analysis

In recent years, IoT (Internet of Things) systems that support human activities based on various types of real-world data (e.g., temperature, location, etc.) have been attracting attention in various fields. However, the behavior of the system is decided based on the real-world data, so the system may cause critical issues if the data is tampered by attackers. Therefore, in order to guarantee reliability of the real-world data, a data management platform utilizing blockchain technology has been studied by many researchers. The blockchain can guarantee integrity of the stored data for the IoT system, but cannot guarantee authenticity of the data because tampering of the data that has not been stored on the database yet cannot be prevented.Therefore, in this study, we propose a new data management platform using blockchain that contributes to provide reliable IoT services by guaranteeing both integrity and authenticity of the real-world data. The data for the IoT service is continuously generated on the real field, and there may exist not only a terminal (e.g., smartphone, sensor node) which is an origin of the data but also the other terminals on the field. In the proposed platform, the origin attempts to guarantee authenticity of the data by requesting the near terminals to generate the same types of data. By comparing the data and the update history of the data among the terminals, the proposed platform attempts to verify authenticity of the data because the tendency of the update history of the origin should be almost the same as that of the cooperators if the data tampering did not occur.In order to evaluate effectiveness of the proposed platform, we design and prototype a data management platform for a physical distribution system. In the prototyped system, the origin terminal which is deployed on a transport vehicle continuously measures the location information, and requests smartphones of pedestrians near the vehicle to obtain the data for verifying the authenticity.