The Internet of Things (IoT) has already reshaped and transformed our lives in many ways ranging from how we communicate with people or manage our health to how we drive our cars and manage our homes. With the rapid development of the IoT ecosystem in a wide range of applications, IoT devices and data are going to be traded as commodities in the marketplace in near future, similar to cloud services or physical objects. Developing such a trading platform has previously been identified as one of the key grand challenges in integration of IoT and data science in this column. Deployment of such a platform obviously raises public concerns on the security and privacy of both data and devices since their ownerships are hard to trace and manage without a central trusted authority. The central trusted authority is not a viable solution for a fully decentralised and distributed IoT ecosystem with a large number of distributed device vendors and consumers who do not trust each other. Blockchain, as a decentralised system, removes the requirement for a trusted third party by allowing all participants to verify the correctness of the data and ensure their immutability. IoT devices can use blockchain to register themselves and organize, store and share streams of data from them effectively and reliably. In this article, through a case study, we demonstrate the applicability of blockchain in IoT devices and their data management with an aim of providing end-to-end trust for trading. We also give a brief introduction to the topics and challenges for future research towards addressing a grand challenge, i.e. developing a trustworthy trading platform for IoT ecosystems.

Contracts, Protocols, Ecosystems, Biomedical monitoring, Stakeholders, Internet of Things

B. Yu, J. Wright, S. Nepal, L. Zhu, J. Liu and R. Ranjan, "IoTChain: Establishing Trust in the Internet of Things Ecosystem Using Blockchain," in IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 12-23, 2018.
doi:10.1109/MCC.2018.043221010