DPKI: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure System

Abstract

As the technology of Internet-of-Things advances, the potential benefit of compromising such a network increases as well. Conventional security stacks already deployed in proven scenarios, such as public key infrastructure on the world wide web, have been applied to the context of Internet-of-Things, however they fail to address certain issues that are prevalent in these networks, the foremost being a secure methodology of verifying the identities of devices without a central point of failure or lack of proper scalability. This paper describes a novel public key infrastructure system that discerns itself from conventional implementations by establishing a distributed network rather than a monolithic one. This enables one to horizontally scale the solution, as there is no reliance on a central authority. Instead, a blockchain is deployed and utilized as the record-keeping of device identities in tandem with smart contracts that interface with the underlying blockchain storage. This solution solves the issues of central point of failure, increases the overall resilience of the public key infrastructure security component and can be arbitrarily enhanced to support a wider array of functionality by introducing new smart contracts within the network itself.