FastPay: A Secure Fast Payment Method for Edge-IoT Platforms using Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain-based cryptocurrency systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted much attention during the last decade. In recent years, a trend of combining Internet of Things (IoT) devices with blockchain technology has emerged. Digital payments can be made on front-end IoT devices, while a back-end blockchain serves as a distributed ledger to ensure the validity of payments across the system. Nevertheless, fast payments are usually on demand in such a scenario, but an open problem still remains on how to protect blockchain-based systems from double-spending attacks in the context of fast payment. Off-chain techniques, such as Lightning Network and Raiden Network, act as countermeasures to this problem, but they all suffer from the hidden transactions problem. To combat this problem, we propose FastPay, a solution for achieving secure fast payments in blockchain-backed edge-IoT systems. Preliminary evaluation on our prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of FastPay.