IoT Security for D-App in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The fast advance and evolution of technology in Internet of Things (IoT) is a double-edged sword, striking with new performant solutions and backfiring with a lot of unanswered questions. Due to cheap manufacturing costs and large-scale production, sensors, actuators and even microcontrollers are not designed with security on the first place. Also, the IoT market is a new one and that means that it is still unregulated and there isn’t a well-defined set of standards to control and manage better these problems. The IoT ascent has impacted many industries, but probably the most changes were made to the Supply Chain Management (SCM) industry. The forementioned question of cheap devices that need to be manufactured with a minimum of costs, very fast and ready to be deployed, is digging a big security hole in this kind of ecosystems. This paper aims to discuss the challenges involved in hardening de security in embedded devices, protecting the data and the communication channels between an IoT node and an IoT gateway and finally, assuring the persistence of data and its security after is stored. All these matters are addressed with privacy and security in design. Because SCM is a multi-party ecosystem that involves many different actors each with its tasks and data handling components, it is important to assure the fact that they will not interfere, tamper, or profit in a bad manner of each other. One solution for this problem is decentralization that comes with strings attached. Finally, and on short, this paper will try to describe a security model based on decentralization in a SCM flow, addressing its threats and how they can be overcome.

Keywords

• iot
• blockchain
• security
• cryptography
• decentralization
• supply chain management