Decentralized Beacons: Attesting the Ground Truth of Blockchain State for Constrained IoT Devices

Abstract

Internet of Thing devices (IoT devices) are often constrained in terms of computing, memory, storage, power, and network resources. This makes them ill-suited to operate as first-class citizens on a blockchain, such as Ethereum, preventing the IoT devices from attaining the security guarantees that are available to better resourced nodes that are able to operate as full, validating nodes on the blockchain. IoT devices may use so-called light protocols to interact with the blockchain with minimal resource requirements, but these protocols provide only probabilistic security guarantees. In this position paper, we propose a new mechanism where an operator of IoT devices is able to send a “ground truth state” to the devices via a new mechanism, which we call “decentralized beacons”, enabling them to gain full security guarantees of the blockchain state.