Replacing Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) by blockchain IoT devices security management

Abstract

On the Internet, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the most advanced credential management system. However, the standard PKI relies on certificate authorities (CAs) which have delivered certificates to the wrong people in the past for questionable reasons. Indeed, these CAs represent a corruptible central point that this work aims to remove. This was done by adapting the PKI to a decentralized framework based on blockchain smart contract. This solution is essentially targeted toward the Internet of Things (IoT) that currently lacks a scalable system for managing keys and identities (i.e., a standard PKI framework). Unlike CA-based PKIs, our framework delivers auditability natively which provides a proof of the framework integrity. In order to adequately test our solution, we designed and implemented a proof of concept. The smart contract was written in solidity and is deployed on the Kovan test net. After testing our solution on an Ubuntu core virtual machine, we found that the solution has a very small footprint and is therefore adapted to the IoT ecosystem.