Blockchain International Scientific Conference https://www.britishblockchainassociation.org/isc2020

1. IoT devices attestation
system using blockchain
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11th March 2020
Blockchain International Scientific Conference 2020
Dr Alistair K Duke
Evandro Pioli Moro

2. Agenda
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• Introduction to Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities
• Relevance of DLTs to IT projects
• IoT device security
• IoT device attestation system for smart cities using
blockchain
• Wrap-up

3. Introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT)
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INFORMATION EXCHANGE
Smart
Parking
Driver
Assist
Waste
Management
Tracing
Assets:
BT Trace
Smart Street
Lighting
APPLICATIONS
LoRa
MESH
CONNECTIVITY
UNB
SENSORS
Light
Sensor
Bin
Usage
Parking
Sensor
Vehicle
Telemetry
RFID
Trace
Soil
Moisture
• Information Services
• IT Services
• Analytics
• Developer Environment
• Service Management
Application
Developers
Data
Exchange
ENVIRONMENTS USERS
Councils
Individuals
Businesses
We’ve met the challenge of delivering IoT across many different environments to multiple users
Enabling the IoT Ecosystem
SECURITY / RESILIENCE / SCALABILITY
Car parks
Industrial
Data
Traffic

4. Recent Smart City projects BT was involved
Three year project—finished in 2017—Milton Keynes
Main objective is to establish a smart city technology
platform and to put in place an integrated innovation and
support programme to ensure that the capability for
growth of Milton Keynes is not compromised.
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Three year project—finished in 2018—Manchester
Recently completed project to build large scale smart city
demonstrators.
It provided Smart City networks, platforms and infrastructure
to enable open innovation.
Central to this will be BT’s Data Exchange, interoperating via
Hypercat with a range of other platforms.

5. Distributed Ledger Technologies for the IoT—why is it relevant?
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Provides trust without relying on a central trusted authority: once information is written to the blockchain, it is continuously and
endlessly verified by the peers. The older the block, more times the information/transactions are verified.
Provides access to a single source of truth for multi-staged/multi-party processes, avoiding conflicting information.
Decentralised: no device/user can take ownership of the network in any significant amount of time, hence no need for a central
authority.
Immutable thus easily auditable: information on the blockchain is easily accessed and traced.
Do the interested parties need access to a single trusted source of truth? [1]
Does the ledger have to be immutable, the data cannot be deleted or updated? [1]
Is an independent and cryptographic audit trail required for the use case, e.g. prove identity, state or provenance of a device? [1]
Does the system have good reasons for not putting a centralised utility in place or to have a single entity in control of the architecture activities?
Does the interest of the parties lie on the success of the system, to keep its distinct characteristics? [1]
Rule-of-thumb for applying DLTs into IT projects
[1] Litan A. (2019). Amazon’s QLDB challenges permissioned blockchain.
https://blogs .gartner.com/avivah-litan/2019/01/21/amazons-qldb-challenges-permissioned-blockchain

6. Smart Cities context—various devices sending real time data to a
centralised platform
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Infrastructure and
process saving
ICT
Investment
More for Less
Creating a digital
model of your world
Welfare risks (health and
social care, air quality, natural
disasters, terrorism)
New Technologies and
Business models
Urgent need for
sustainable growth
Changing demographics
and urbanisation
More informed people,
machines and
organisations make
better decisions
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VariousNetworks:Wi-Fi,GSM,LPWA,etc.
Dataplatform

7. Smart Cities context—realisable full-M2M scenario
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Monitoring
station
Traffic
control
Weather
aggregator
Traffic live
feed
Police
5G Edge
Cloud
platforms
Devices are constrained in battery and computing power,
but we still want to realise a full M2M system…
• Device identity?
• Data attestation?
• Failures?
How to guarantee security?
Across ICT academia and industry, the overall expenditure
per year:
• Was £780mi in 2018,
• Will be 4 times that in 2022
Market size

8. Smart Cities context—DLTs to provide data attestation for IoT devices
Transactions data field of blockchains are not verified in a use
case relevant way, representing a potential risk for sensitive
systems.
If the devices either are peers of the DLT, or have the capability
of signing transactions (light nodes), the IoT messages can be
relayed to a DLT.
Via device profiling, either using smart contracts, an API at the
receiving end or a transactions inspection interface, the IoT
data can be inspected according to the:
• Role of the device on the network,
• Expected frequency of updates,
• Expected range of values,
• Other data related issues.

9. Smart Cities context—DLTs to provide data attestation for IoT devices
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Blockchain acting as a decentralised, immutable and trusted
devices profiles storage system.
Depending on the architecture, the blockchain can
independently perform attestation of these devices + flag
failures and/or restrict further access to the network.
Patent filed March 2019.
Next steps: iTRACE (funded by innovateUK)
• £2.5mi project over 24 months started Dec-19, with Cisco,
University of Warwick and Senseon.
• Using blockchain and AI at network level to guarantee
integrity and provenance of messages from constrained IoT
devices for the UK water industry.

10. Q&As

11. © British Telecommunications plc