Veritaa-IoT: A Distributed Public Key Infrastructure for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and improved interoperability between various IoT devices of different manufacturers and owners, verifying the authenticity and integrity of data becomes a challenge. Cryptographic signatures together with Distributed Public Key Infrastructures (DPKI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are promising solutions to this challenge. In this work, we extended the Veritaa framework, a DLT-based DPKI with an immutable signature store, to support IoT applications and evaluate its applicability. Therefore, we propose the systems architecture and implement a low-power IoT client. We built a real-world testbed with different sensors to evaluate the proposed architecture and extensions. In the evaluation, we analyze the time required to secure sensor data on the DLT, the overhead introduced to assert authenticity, integrity, and immutability of the data, and the security of our proposed solution.