DistBlockNet: A Distributed Blockchains-Based Secure SDN Architecture for IoT Networks

TLDR

The rapid growth of IoT devices has exposed flexibility, efficiency, availability, security, and scalability challenges, prompting the need for architectures that combine SDN and blockchain to provide secure, scalable, and efficient networks through verifiable peer‑to‑peer interactions. This work proposes DistBlockNet, a distributed secure SDN architecture that leverages blockchain technology to address these IoT challenges. DistBlockNet introduces a blockchain‑based flow‑rule update scheme that verifies, validates, and distributes the latest rule set while automatically adapting security to evolving threats without manual administrator intervention. Evaluation shows DistBlockNet detects IoT attacks in real time with minimal performance overhead, outperforming existing models and satisfying future IoT design principles.

Abstract

The rapid increase in the number and diversity of smart devices connected to the Internet has raised the issues of flexibility, efficiency, availability, security, and scalability within the current IoT network. These issues are caused by key mechanisms being distributed to the IoT network on a large scale, which is why a distributed secure SDN architecture for IoT using the blockchain technique (DistBlockNet) is proposed in this research. It follows the principles required for designing a secure, scalable, and efficient network architecture. The DistBlockNet model of IoT architecture combines the advantages of two emerging technologies: SDN and blockchains technology. In a verifiable manner, blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-confident members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary. A new scheme for updating a flow rule table using a blockchains technique is proposed to securely verify a version of the flow rule table, validate the flow rule table, and download the latest flow rules table for the IoT forwarding devices. In our proposed architecture, security must automatically adapt to the threat landscape, without administrator needs to review and apply thousands of recommendations and opinions manually. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed model architecture and compared it to the existing model with respect to various metrics. The results of our evaluation show that DistBlockNet is capable of detecting attacks in the IoT network in real time with low performance overheads and satisfying the design principles required for the future IoT network.