A scalable cost-effective IOTA tangle based approach for trustworthiness of IoT nodes / Abdul Rehman Ali. [Thesis or Dissertation]

Thesis (MS) -- COMSATS University Islamabad, 2022.

Thesis (MS) A Post Graduate thesis submitted to the department of Computer Science as partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of degree of MS Information Security. COMSATS University Islamabad. 2022.

Chapter 1: Introduction --
1.1 Overview of Research
1.2 Motivation
1.2.1 IoT Security and Privacy
1.2.2 End-to-end IoT security
1.2.3 IoT Challenges
1.3 Problem Statement
1.3.1 Description of Problem Statement
1.4 Research Objectives
1.5 Research Questions
1.6 Research Contribution
1.7 Research Significance
1.7.1 DAG-structured Blockchain significance in industry
1.7.2 Banking and financial industry benefits
1.7.3 Healthcare benefits
1.7.4 Manufacturing Industry
1.8 Thesis Structure
1.9 Chapter Summary
Chapter 2: Preliminary Studies --
2.1 Internet of Things (IoTs)
2.2 Scalability in IoT
2.2.1 Scalability in terms of future adaptability of IoT
2.2.1.1 Vertical scalability
2.2.1.2 Horizontal scalability
2.2.2 Scalability in terms of infrastructure of IoT
2.2.2.1 Device level
2.2.2.2 Communication level
2.2.2.3 Gateway level
2.2.2.4 Server/Cloud level
2.2.3 IoT Vulnerabilities
2.2.3.1 Centralized and Decentralized Mechanisms
2.3 Blockchain
2.3.1 Blockchain and Nakamoto Consensus
2.3.2 Blockchain Security
2.4 Importance of Blockchain for IoT
2.4.1 Various Sorts of Blockchain
2.4.1.1 Public Blockchain
2.4.1.2 Private Blockchain
2.4.1.3 Consortium Blockchain
2.4.1.4 Hybrid Blockchain
2.4.2 Consensus Mechanisms
2.4.2.1 PoW (Proof of Work)
2.4.2.2 PoS (Proof of Stake)
2.4.2.3 DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake)
2.4.2.4 PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance)
2.4.2.5 Proof of Authority (PoA)
2.5 Chain-Structured Blockchain
2.6 DAG-Structured Blockchain
2.6.1 Cumulative Weight
2.7 Summary
Chapter 3: Literature Review --
3.1 Trustworthiness of Internet of Things
3.2 IoT Security Based on Blockchain Technology
Chapter 4: Research Methodology --
4.1 Research Setting
4.2 Methods Used
4.3 Data Analysis
4.4 Evaluation method and criteria
4.4.1 Transaction arrival rate (λ)
4.4.2 Average Transaction per Seconds
4.4.3 Cumulative Weight
4.4.4 Difficulty Level
Chapter 5: Proposed Solution --
5.1 Proposed System Model
5.1.1 Assumptions
5.2 System Architecture
5.3 Components of the Proposed Model
5.3.1 Initialization
5.3.2 Transaction layout
5.3.3 Transaction Confirmation
5.3.4 Data Storage
5.4 Consensus Process
5.5 Trust Evaluation Method
5.6 Adaptive PoW
5.6.1 Algorithm
5.7 Chapter Summary
Chapter 6: Experimental Results and Evaluation --
6.1 Experimental Setup
6.2 Evaluation and Analysis
6.2.1 Performance in Adaptive PoW Mechanism
6.2.2 Transactions Throughput
6.2.3 Performance Comparison
6.2.4 Security Analysis
Chapter 7: Conclusion and Future Work --
7.1 Conclusion
7.2 Future work

Not available for commercial use, sale, or reproduction. Islamabad. Junaid Zaidi libray Available to CUI libraries only CUI

Internet of Things (IoTs) are generally deployed in an unfriendly surrounding,
where its security and reliability are continuously concerned problems for the re-
searchers that need to be addressed. The IoT devices play a vital role in the
diversification of modern internet technology. The core concept of IoT is wire-
less sensor networks that contain number of sensor nodes structured in an ad-hoc
manner. These nodes interact and collaborate with each other to perform specific
operations. Even though these collaboration interactions make the network more
proficient however may have to face more internal and external security threats.
The only solution is to set up a trustworthy environment where nodes can collabo-
rate, interact with each other in a secure way. Countless solutions are proposed in
order to set up a trustworthy environment however they all have some drawbacks
and are not convenient for these devices. As IoT nodes are resource-constrained,
they do not have much storage to maintain the trust score. Many solutions are
proposed based on Blockchain technology however they have certain limitations.
For instance, high transaction fee, high resource consumption and transaction con-
firmation delay. Considering these limitations, an IOTA scheme based on tangle
has been proposed for assessing the trustworthiness and storing trust score of IoT
nodes. A DAG-structured blockchain is deployed among trust manager nodes
which maintain the trust value of each node by evaluating its cumulative weight.
The research and simulation results reveal that the suggested system can efficiently
handle the network’s high load while also providing complete security and enhanc-
ing performance. To maintain the growth rate and throughput of network, a new
light-weight adaptive PoW consensus mechanism is proposed that dynamically
adjust difficulty level based on computational power. The performance has been
evaluated on the basis of different metric values. The proposed scheme can effi-
ciently handle the network’s high load while enhancing performance and providing
complete security.

CUI Patrons.

MS in Information Security Graduate & Post graduate MS & PhD.

To award degree of MS in Information Security