A Model of Decentralized Social Internet of Things using Blockchain Offline Channels

Abstract

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) enables IoT devices to discover the services offered by each other using a social network. The social network connects two devices if they have a common owner or both manufactured by the same company or they are situated at the same location etc. Centralized SIoT platforms have security and privacy problems. We advance the state of art in SIoT as we have developed a decentralized SIoT platform. In a decentralized SIoT platform, the services provided by a device is only known to its neighbours. Due to such characteristics of decentralized SIoT platform, there are several challenges in designing it, such as verification of social neighbourhood, privacy-preserving search in SIoTs, and scalability of SIoT platform. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based SIoT platform to mitigate these problems. Our main contributions are: We developed a decentralized SIoT platform that allows secure privacy-preserving method to verify social neighbourhood a device, we developed a protocol to find devices in the decentralized SIoT and we developed a high scale decentralized SIoT platform using blockchain offline channels. We prove the proposed decentralized SIoT platform is privacy-preserving, secure, and scalable.