Towards a Lightweight Blockchain Platform for Critical Infrastructure Protection

Abstract

Critical Infrastructures are one of the vital systems that support modern societies. The adoption of technologies like Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in critical infrastructures have made it a lucrative target for cyberattackers. Protecting critical infrastructure is of paramount importance due to the sensitive nature of the data coupled with the resource-constrained nature of the devices. The advent of blockchains can be a significant enabler for protecting critical infrastructure through the use of immutable ledger for storing the operations. However, blockchains are computationally expensive, have limited scalability and incur significant delays in processing transactions thus necessitating the development of a lightweight platform while retaining the functionality. This paper develops a lightweight blockchain based framework for protecting critical infrastructure by leveraging its hierarchical nature. Evaluation using embedded devices shows that our proposed framework minimizes the execution time of blockchain operations thus making it suitable for protecting critical infrastructure. Finally, our proposed framework is generic, in that it can be applied to any of the domains operating in the critical infrastructure.