IoT root union: A decentralized name resolving system for IoT based on blockchain

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102553Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Our paper propose IoT Root Union, which:

  • Enables IoT producers to protect their own name resolution process by independently selecting organization for their name management.

  • Adopting all existing IoT name schemes with the same root zone start point.

Abstract

A name resolving system services as the entrance to the IoT data, thus protecting the name resolving process and making it straight and simple are critical for the widespread application of IoT services. However, due to the centralized name management structure of the existing IoT name resolving systems, it is hard to secure the name resolving process from being tampered by the root owner of the name resolving system; due to the diversity and heterogeneous of the existing name resolving systems, it is hard to provide an unified name resolving service because the existing name resolving systems can hardly be compatible with each other. Herein, it is necessary to construct a general entrance to the existing IoT name resolving systems, and ensure that no IoT name could be malicious tampered.

In this paper, we propose the IoT-RU, a decentralized name resolving system for IoT. To persuade the IoT data service providers to participate in our IoT-RU, we construct its name resolving database on the blockchain ledger. To enable the adoption of the existing IoT naming schemes, IoT-RU integrates various name resolving schemes to resolve the IoT service providers in our system, and leave the job of locating individual IoT devices to the IoT service providers. We further investigate the feasibility of name management and resolving based on the current blockchain architectures. Based on the Ethereum platform, we construct a prototype of our name resolving system, and the corresponding evaluation indicates that our name resolving system manages to provide acceptable and scalable name resolution services.

Introduction

With the great wave of the 5th generation mobile networks, bringing everything into our digital daily life turns out to be a growing trend. Medical equipment, household appliances, transportation facility, industrial production systems etc, everything could be smart and improve the quality of our daily lives. Based on the value generated from a single kind of smart devices data, data integration over multiple kinds of smart device data turns out to be much more valuable, especially for the integration of data from multiple Industrial IoTs service providers. To conduct high level data integration of IoT data, quite a number of IoT data are encapsulated as web service to provide data to the rest of the world (Theodoridis et al., 2013 Jul 10, Tian et al., 2019, Li et al., July 2020, Du et al., May 2008, Tian et al., 2019, Du et al., 2007, Tian et al., 2020, Wu et al., March 2018, Huang and Du, Du et al., May 2001, Wang et al., OCTOBER 2018, Qiu et al., 2020, Tseng et al., 2020 Jul 9, Baniata et al., 2021, Chen et al., 2020, Berdik et al., Zhao et al., Li et al., 2020, Tseng et al., 2020 Jan 31, Zafar et al., 2019 Dec 15, Alfandi et al., 2020 Apr 20, Su et al., 2020 Jun 12). For adequate resource and data management of IoT device data, it is of great importance to ensure that IoT devices could be located and recognized accurately and flexibly. Therein, name resolution plays a critical role in the digital world of IoT. A name resolution service translates the identification of IoT devices into corresponding addresses, and enable the IoT device resource access without consideration of resource management. Thus taking advantage of as much available IoT data resource as possible should have very high priority on the to-do list of Internet currently, i.e. a global and general name resolving system which could be accepted by everyone is imperative.

As an information management system, a name resolving system manages the name resource information collected from name registrants, and responses to the name resolving requests. During the last two decades, researchers have paid abundant efforts to develop general name resolution schemes for IoT systems, such as OID (Wieringa and Jonge, 1995), ONS (Mcfarlane et al., 2006, Schapranow et al., 2011, Seong Leong et al., December 2013), handle (Technical Manual, Sun and Reston, 1998, Sun et al., 2003, Sun et al., 2003, Sun et al., 2003.), Ucode (T-Engine Forum, Ubiquitous ID Center 2008, The uIDCenter home page), Ecode (GB/T 31866 2015) etc. However, just like the early ages of Internet, none of such schemes manage to gain the upper land (Li, 2013). The existing name resolving systems are basically running their own business with no involvement with each other, in spite of their declaration of good compatibility. And a global general name resolving system still has a long way to go to be fulfilled.

Generally, we believe that there are 2 obstacles on the way to a global general name resolving system:

The First one is the concern of protecting the name resolution process. According to the zooko triangle (Swartz, January 6, 2011), a name resolving system can hardly meet the 3 requirements of being human meaningful, decentralized, and secure. The majority of the existing name resolving systems select the attribute of human meaningful and secure, making themselves centralized name resolving systems. A centralized name resolving system requires all the resolving processes to share the same start point, which is usually a shared central management third party entity for most IoT data providers (an IoT data provider here refers to the entity which provides data collected from IoT devices to the outside world). The problem is who should be responsible for the central management entity? If the IoT data comes from various communities or countries, and the central entity is under control of a certain community or country, the IoT data provider would keep worrying that their name resolution process would be monitored or tampered, leading to the problems like name hijacking. Herein, a centralized name resolving system can hardly satisfy all IoT providers from various communities or countries, especially for industrial IoT data providers whose data is very sensitive. Thus there can hardly be a global name resolving system which could attract all IoT data provider to join in.

Second, the cost of name transforming between name resolving systems. In spite of the existing name resolving systems’ similar general structure, name transforming is inevitable when a compatible name resolving system wants to resolve names following another name resolving system. Such transforming always brings in additional cost which would delay the resolving process and increase system burden. Worse still, transforming among name resolving systems could be very costly.

To crossover the above 2 obstacles, we believe there are two principles which should be followed. 1) In a global name resolving system, every IoT provider should be able to determine their resolution process, so they would have another choice when they find that their current resolution process are not secure. 2) A global name resolving system should also be able to take in all existing name resolving systems to relieve the cost of migration from the existing name resolving systems to the new name resolving systems.

One may claim that handle would satisfy our principles, since handle system conducts separate name registration in 10 various countries, and broadcast name resolving information by communicating with each other. However, the name resolving process in handle system is secure only when the communication among countries is credible. Otherwise one country may hijack the native resolving queries to the other countries by tampering the name resolving information registered in foreign countries.

Recently, it is widely discussed to construct a decentralized DNS system based on blockchain (McArdle and Sancho, Ali et al., 2016). We believe that this is also a good opportunity for the name resolving systems of IoT, because a decentralized name resolving system would give IoT data providers multiple choices for their selection of the safe resolution start points. Herein, we propose the IoT-RU (IoT Root Union) as a global general name resolving system.

Generally, our idea is to manage a set of IoT roots. Each root is responsible for the name management and the start point of name resolution. An IoT root keeps records of the name management information on the blockchain ledger, and exchanges with each other to broadcast and share its name management information in the naming system. To attract all IoT providers following the other existing name resolving systems, we define a general namespace in our name resolving system, which requires no transform from the original name resolving system. Each IoT root conducts name resolving for multiple name resolving systems, so that an IoT provider can easily migrate their name resolution from their original name resolving system to ours.

Our contribution in this paper includes 2 folds. First, we propose the framework design of IoT Root Union, including the design of system structure, namespace, registering and resolution procedure, and running example. Second, we take the first step to construct a prototype of our IoT Root Union, and evaluate its performance. According to our evaluation, our IoT Root Union is able to work in an acceptable and scalable mode.

The rest of this paper is organized as following. In Section 2, we will introduce the related works of name resolving systems for IoT. In Section 3, we make the statement of our framework followed with a running example in Section 4. We then evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in Section 5 and conclude this paper in Section 6.

Section snippets

Name resolving systems for IoT

The research community has a long history to pursue a general name resolving system. The first proposed one is OID (Wieringa and Jonge, 1995), OID adopts a hierarchical structure similar to DNS, whose names are separated by “.” with no limit to the number of “.” in an OID name. Since OID is proposed in ahead of the current IoT networks, its syntax can hardly support the current IoT device identifications. For the rest name resolving systems, most of them considered the IoT naming schemes like

Framework Design

In the following sections, we introduce our proposed name resolving system of IoT Root Union. Our IoT Root Union aims at enabling every IoT data provider to select from a list of name management entity for name registry and resolution, so that each IoT data provider is able to determine their own way to be resolved. Thus IoT Root Union would be perfectly fit for the name resolution of IoT, because resource data provided by IoT data producers are usually very sensitive because of their belonging

Running Example

In this section, we give an running example of our system. We setup the back ground of the example as, a manufacture X using ONS system wants to migrate its resolving data to our system. Therein, a name in the original system is an EPC code. For example, a 96-bit EPC name “01.0000A89.00016F.000169DC0”. Here, “01” refers to the version field; “0000A89” refers to the manufacturer field; “00016F” refers to the product field; and “000169DC0” refers to the serial number.

According to our definition

Evaluation

To evaluation the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we construct a prototype of IOT-RU based on the Ethereum platform. The blockstack platform's latest version is still on tested, compare with its beta version is not fair and it actually doesn't work so well in our evaluation. In the following, we will introduce the experiment setup and the evaluation of read and write performance of our prototype.

Conclusion

In this paper, we propose the framework of IoT Root Union, which manages the IoT name resource information on blockchain, and provides a general IoT name resolving service. The contribution of our IoT-RU includes 2 folds: 1) it gives the IoT device owners choices to migrate their current name resolving process onto our system by getting access to a blockchain node, so that the IoT device owners could have options when they want to change their current name resolving process; 2) it integrates

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shen Su: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Zhihong Tian: Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Shuang Li: Validation, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing. Jinxi Deng: Project administration. Lihua Yin: Validation, Investigation, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Xiaojiang Du: Validation, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. Mohsen Guizani: Writing

Acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by the National Key research and Development Plan (Grant No. 2018YFB1800701), Guangdong Province Key Research and Development Plan (Grant No. 2019B010137004), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61902083, No. U20B2046), Zhijiang Lab Scholar Funded Scheme for International young talents and Guangdong Province Universities and Colleges Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme (2019).

Shen Su, born in 1985, Ph.D., assistant professor, Guangzhou Unversity. His current research interests include inter-domain routing and security, Internet of connected vehicles, and wireless sensor networks. E-mail: [email protected].

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    Shen Su, born in 1985, Ph.D., assistant professor, Guangzhou Unversity. His current research interests include inter-domain routing and security, Internet of connected vehicles, and wireless sensor networks. E-mail: [email protected].

    Zhihong Tian, Ph.D., professor, PHD supervisor, Dean of cyberspace institute of advanced technology, Guangzhou University. Standing director of CyberSecurity Association of China. Member of China Computer Federation. From 2003 to 2016, he worked at Harbin Institute of Technology. His current research interest is computer network and network security. E-mail: tianzhihong@ gzhu.edu.cn.

    Shuang Li, born in 1997, received his B.E. degree in information security from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2019 and is currently pursuing the master degree in cyberspace security from Guangzhou University. Her research interests include blockchain, computer networking and DNS. Email: [email protected]

    Jinxi Deng, born in 1996, received the B.E. degree in computer science and technology from South China Agricultural University in 2018 and is currently pursuing the master degree in cyberspace security from Guangzhou University. His research interests include blockchain, computer networking and DNS. Email: [email protected]

    Lihua Yin, was born in 1973. She received the Ph.D. degree. She is currently a Professor and a Ph.D. Supervisor with Guangzhou University. Her current research interests include computer network and network security. She is a member of the China Computer Federation.

    Xiaojiang Du received his B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (Automation Department) from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Dr. Du is a tenured Full Professor and the Director of the Security And Networking (SAN) Lab in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. His research interests are security, wireless networks, and systems. He has authored over 400 journal and conference papers in these areas, as well as a book published by Springer. Dr. Du has been awarded more than 6 million US Dollars research grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Army Research Office, Air Force Research Lab, NASA, the State of Pennsylvania, and Amazon. He won the best paper award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 and the best poster runner-up award at the ACM MobiHoc 2014. He serves on the editorial boards of two international journals. Dr. Du served as the lead Chair of the Communication and Information Security Symposium of the IEEE International Communication Conference (ICC) 2015, and a Co-Chair of Mobile and Wireless Networks Track of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2015. He is (was) a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member of several premier ACM/IEEE conferences such as INFOCOM (2007 - 2020), IM, NOMS, ICC, GLOBECOM, WCNC, BroadNet, and IPCCC. Dr. Du is an IEEE Fellow and a Life Member of ACM.

    Mohsen Guizani received the B.S. (with distinction) and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA, in 1984, 1986, 1987, and 1990, respectively. He is currently a Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department in Qatar University, Qatar. His research interests include wireless communications and mobile computing, computer networks, mobile cloud computing, security, and smart grid. Throughout his career, he received three teaching awards and four research awards. He also received the 2017 IEEE Communications Society WTC Recognition Award as well as the 2018 AdHoc Technical Committee Recognition Award for his contribution to outstanding research in wireless communications and Ad-Hoc Sensor networks. He was the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Wireless Technical Committee and the Chair of the TAOS Technical Committee. He served as the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Speaker and is currently the IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Senior Member of ACM.

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