NetDAO: Toward Trustful and Secure IoT Networks without Central Gateways

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) suffers from a profound lack of trust between central gateways and sensors, e.g., gateways suspect sensors of flooding malicious packets, and vice versa, sensors suspect gateways of manipulating traffic data. One important reason for the mistrust is the asymmetry of a centralized network organization. A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) can establish a trustful and symmetric network with the blockchain. However, it is a vacant area for IoT networks to build trust between gateways and sensors within the DAO. In this paper, we firstly propose a trustful and secure IoT Network DAO solution (NetDAO) to mitigate the data manipulation and the malicious flooding packets. In particular, the NetDAO has a security rating algorithm to assign a reputation value for each entity in the network. Based on this, each entity can mitigate the malicious flooding packets using a proof-of-reputation packet-forwarding mechanism. In addition, the NetDAO stores traffic data using the blockchain to mitigate the data manipulation. The experimental results show that the NetDAO effectively mitigates malicious flooding packets and costs 1 s for ∼480 entities to complete the rating algorithm.

Keywords

• IoT
• DAO
• blockchain
• trustful network