A Survey of IoT and Blockchain Integration: Security Perspective

Abstract

Blockchain has recently attracted significant academic attention in research fields beyond the financial industry. In the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain can be used to create a decentralized, reliable, and secure environment. The use of blockchain in IoT applications is still in its early stages, particularly at the low end of the computing spectrum. As a result, the future roadmap is hazy, and several challenges and questions must be addressed. Several articles combining blockchain technology with IoT have recently been released, but they are limited to shallow technological potential discussions, with very few providing an in- depth examination of the complexities of implementing blockchain technology for IoT. Therefore, this paper aims to coherently and comprehensively provide current cutting-edge efforts in this direction. It provides a literature review of IoT and blockchain integration by examining current research issues and trends in the applications of blockchain-related approaches and technologies within the IoT security context. We have surveyed published articles from 2017 to 2021 on blockchain-based solutions for IoT security, taking into consideration different security areas and then, we have organized the available articles according to these areas. The surveyed articles have been chronologically organized in tables for better clarity. In this paper, we try to investigate the vital issues and challenges to the integration of IoT and blockchain, and then investigate the research efforts that have been conducted so far to overcome these challenges.