SOTARU: Consortium Blockchain-Based Approach to Remote Firmware Update in the IoT Scenario

• Cleber S. Peter UCPEL
• Lucas Penning UCPEL
• Alexandra Zimpeck UCPEL
• Felipe Marques UFPEL
• Jorge Barbosa UNISINOS
• Adenauer Yamin UCPEL / UFPEL

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/semish.2022.223110

Abstract

Due to the required scalability, providing the storage and distribution of updates for the devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a high challenge for network infrastructures. In this scenario, this article presents a new approach, called SOTARU, which proposes the use of a Blockchain consortium between embedded system manufacturers to provide a shared and decentralized, but also secure, infrastructure. The proposal was deployed on EXEHDA middleware nodes and through the distributed network emulator Common Open Research Emulator (CORE), it was also possible to evaluate its security and robustness. As a result, it was found that SOTARU stands out in terms of security when compared to other approaches proposed in the literature, as well as being functional even in high latency scenarios.

Keywords: Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerant Systems

References

Ahrenholz, J., Danilov, C., Henderson, T. R., and Kim, J. H. (2008). CORE: A real-time network emulator. In MILCOM 2008 2008 IEEE Military Communications Conference. IEEE.

Anastasiou, A., Christodoulou, P., Christodoulou, K., Vassiliou, V., and Zinonos, Z. (2020). IoT device firmware update over LoRa: The blockchain solution. In 2020 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS). IEEE.

Baza, M., Nabil, M., Lasla, N., Fidan, K., Mahmoud, M., and Abdallah, M. (2019). Blockchain-based firmware update scheme tailored for autonomous vehicles. In 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC). IEEE.

Bettayeb, M., Nasir, Q., and Talib, M. A. (2019). Firmware update attacks and security for IoT devices. In Proceedings of the ArabWIC 6th Annual International Conference Research Track on ArabWIC 2019. ACM Press.

Choi, S. and Lee, J.-H. (2020). Blockchain-based distributed firmware update architecture for IoT devices. IEEE Access, 8:37518–37525.

Lopez-Viana, R., Diaz, J., Diaz, V. H., and Martinez, J.-F. (2020). Continuous delivery of customized SaaS edge applications in highly distributed IoT systems. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 7(10):10189–10199.

Machado, R., Almeida, R. B., da Rosa, D. Y. L., Lopes, J. L. B., Pernas, A. M., and Yamin, A. C. (2017). EXEHDA-HM: A compositional approach to explore contextual information on hybrid models. Future Gener. Comput. Syst., 73:1–12.

Mahesh, N. (2021). Azure network round-trip latency statistics.

Moran, B., Tschofenig, H., Brown, D., and Meriac, M. (2021). A Firmware Update Architecture for Internet of Things. RFC 9019.

Ongaro, D. and Ousterhout, J. (2014). In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. In Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC’14, page 305–320, USA. USENIX Association.

Peter, C. S., Oliveira, T., Monks, E. M., Motta, F. P., Barbosa, J. L. V., and Yamin, A. C. Y. (2021). iota: An approach to secure over-the-air updates on the internet of things scenario. In Anais do XXVII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Multimídia e Web, pages 173–176, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC.

Wust, K. and Gervais, A. (2018). Do you need a blockchain? In 2018 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT). IEEE.

Yohan, A. and Lo, N.-W. (2018). An over-the-blockchain firmware update framework for IoT devices. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC). IEEE.

Zhao, Y., Liu, Y., Tian, A., Yu, Y., and Du, X. (2019). Blockchain based privacy-preserving software updates with proof-of-delivery for internet of things. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 132:141–149.