A Review on Cyber-Physical Systems based on Blockchain: Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are booming technologies for researchers and industries that are closely correlated to each other to perform task-oriented operations. The IoT is a collection of smart sensor devices connected with the internet whereas, the CPS incorporates the computation, networking, control, and monitoring of these smart sensor devices remotely. As a result, privacy and security are deeply affected due to eavesdroppers or attackers. Further, the range of CPS applications comprising IoT suffers from various challenges, including robustness, trust, data breach, availability, single point of failure, and interoperability because of the existing centralized architecture. Therefore, incorporating decentralized technology such as blockchain is required to overcome the CPS challenges and ensure immutability, fault tolerance, and consistency using the consensus mechanism and smart contract implementation. In this context, this paper provides a systematic review of blockchain and CPS incorporating IoT. The provided survey is divided into three categories such as security, privacy, and trust. These three categories explain the use of blockchain to overcome security attacks and threats, privacy preservation, and trust management issues by combining different latest techniques such as cloud computing, edge computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, side-chain, etc.