Autonomous and malware-proof blockchain-based firmware update platform with efficient batch verification for Internet of Things devices

doi:10.1016/j.cose.2019.06.008

Computers & Security

Volume 86, September 2019, Pages 238-252

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2019.06.008 Get rights and content

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are expected to penetrate users’ lives everywhere. However, the occurrence of several massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in infected IoT devices has brought increased attention to the importance of IoT security. Since IoT devices are equipped only with lightweight operation systems, the installation of antivirus software cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, a method through which the firmware of IoT devices can be securely and autonomously updated must be developed. This paper proposes a blockchain-based firmware updating platform to enhance the process of updating firmware. A smart contract is used to ensure integrity and enforce the scanning of malicious code. With a peer-to-peer file sharing system, our platform enjoys high availability without the single failure point problem, mitigating the possibility of DDoS attacks. We use batch verification in case of multiple updating requests for better scalability. Through function comparisons and performance simulation, our scheme is shown to be effective in strengthening IoT security.

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become extremely popular with the rapid development of small low-cost sensors, wireless communication technologies, and new Internet techniques (Chen et al., 2017). IoT techniques are applied to different scenarios including intelligent transportation and logistics, smart homes, environmental monitoring, medical and health care. Gartner forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things were in use worldwide in 2017, having increased 31 percent from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020 (Gartner, 2017). The total spending on endpoints and services could have reached almost two trillion in 2017. However, the increasing popularity of IoT devices has been accompanied by several challenges including security and infrastructure scalability. In terms of security, IoT devices are designed for lightweight operating systems. Therefore, they are difficult to equip with antivirus software in the sense that their security depends on whether the manufacturers consider security problems.

Unfortunately, IoT devices still have new weaknesses (Puri, 2016) such as vulnerable firmware, poor authentication, compromised OS tools, and insecure chipsets. Consequently, several security attacks have occurred. In October 2016, DDoS attacks brought down the Internet across the United States, fortunately for only a couple of hours (EMI, Yan, Yu, Gong, 2016). Despite some progress in software engineering resulting from the use of better programming models, improved development methods, and more effective testing tools, the software is still far from perfect (Chen et al., 2011). Therefore, one feasible means of protecting embedded devices is the continuous updating of the latest firmware (Hayden et al., 2012).

Moreover, how to deal with the scalability of massive IoT devices is another emerging issue. Assume a scenario in which a popular manufacturer of IoT devices sells more than ten thousands products per year; once a well-known weakness reveals itself, hundreds of thousands of IoT devices must update their own firmware. However, a typical website cannot serve more than five thousand people in the same time period, let alone handle hundreds of thousands of IoT devices. As a result, each manufacturer must incur substantial cost and spend substantial time maintaining updating servers to increase service availability.

Currently, a breakthrough technology called blockchain (Nakamoto, 2008) is receiving ever-increasing attention, with approximately $300 million invested in 2016 (Dinh, Liu, Zhang, Chen, Ooi, Wang, 2018, Gatteschi, Lamberti, Demartini, Pranteda, Santamaría, 2018). Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008) is the most well-known application of blockchain. A blockchain is a distributed database with strong security protection. Each node in a blockchain maintains a ledger shared with the other nodes. As long as a transaction (information) is recorded on a blockchain, security assurance can be exponentially improved over time. The essential characteristics include immutability, consensus, finality, and provenance. Since 2014, the Ethereum blockchain (Dannen, 2017) protocol has been equipped with a function of smart contracts to improve the programming ability of Bitcoin. A smart contract is a distributed and Turing-complete program. As a result, the outcome of a smart contract is solid and verified by each node, which can effectively enhance security and scalability.

In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based firmware updating platform with efficient batch verification to enhance security and scalability for IoT devices. First, a smart contract is used to perform the autonomous updating procedure, and to ensure that the download URL and checksum of the latest firmware file are malware proof. Next, we integrate the virus scanning website VirusTotal (Google, 2017) into our smart contract to check whether any malware is embedded in the latest firmware. To improve scalability, batch verification for signatures is proposed to facilitate must-do multiple signature verifications.¹

To summarize, the contributions of this paper include (1) ensuring firmware integrity, (2) detecting malicious code, (3) improving scalability, (4) reducing occurrences of. DDoS and advanced persistent threat (APT) motivation, and (5) shortening signature verification time.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, related work is surveyed. The security requirements and cryptographic preliminaries of our scheme are discussed in Section 3. The proposed blockchain-based firmware updating platform is described in Section 4. In Section 5, we describe the security analysis and performance evaluations. The platform prototype is implemented and set up to verify our mechanism in Section 6. We conclude the paper in Section 7.

Section snippets

Current firmware updating mechanism for IoT devices

IoT devices have become particularly popular with the rapid development of small low-cost sensors, wireless communication technologies, and new Internet techniques that have become integral to the connected world (Xu et al., 2018a). Firmware updating is essential for such tasks as enhancing security, fixing bugs, and upgrading functionality. The complexity and functionality of IoT devices are increasing in response to user demands. Hence, many companies tend to develop firmware with third-party

Security requirements and cryptographic preliminaries

In this section, we introduce the system model and security and performance objectives that must be considered for a secure firmware updating mechanism. Then, the cryptographic preliminaries of our scheme are also briefly illustrated.

Proposed blockchain-based firmware updating platform

In this section, we present the details of our blockchain-based firmware updating platform based on identity-based cryptography. The proposed scheme includes the following phases: system setup and registration, manufacture update firmware procedure, device query and update procedure, and transaction and batch verification. The notations and parameters throughout this paper are listed in Table 1.

Security analysis and performance simulation

In this section, we analyze the proposed scheme in terms of security analysis and performance simulation. In the security analysis, we focus on firmware integrity, APT, DDoS, and malicious code resistance. Next, we evaluate performance in terms of signature verification and transmission delay efficiency.

Prototype implementation

In this section, we describe our prototype based on the Ethereum blockchain and distributed storage scheme swarm. Our prototype consists of two principal components: (i) the blockchain infrastructure and (ii) IoT devices. We present two evaluation procedures for measuring the performance of our prototype system, the firmware uploading procedure for manufacturers and the downloading procedure of IoT devices.

Conclusions

We have proposed a novel firmware update platform for IoT devices, which enhances the process of firmware updating more efficient and secure. In particular, the proposed scheme is based on blockchain technology and takes advantage of smart contracts to ensure the firmware integrity and achieve malware-proof property. To provide high availability of our update platform, we apply peer-to-peer file sharing technique which can not only store various device firmware versions in a distributed way but

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work was partially supported by MOST 107-2221-E-492-008, MOST 108-2218-E-001-001, and MOST 108-2221-E-492-007-MY3.

Jen-Wei Hu received the B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, in 2001, and the M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, in 2003. Currently, he works as an associate engineer in the Network and Security Division of National Center for High-Performance Computing, Taiwan. His current research interests include software-defined networking, networking in data centers, and blockchain technology.

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Lo-Yao Yeh received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan 2010. He is currently an associate researcher at the National Center for High-Performance Computing and adjunct assistant professor at National Chi Nan University. His current research interests include cryptography, network security, vehicular networks security, and Botnet. He was a visiting scholar in University of California, Berkeley. He has obtained Yuan-Ze Scientific Paper Award in 2011. Recently, he is responsible for leading the Blockchain lab in NCHC to implement some practical Blockchain projects. His current research interests include applied cryptography, Blockchain, Cloud computing, VANETs security, and botnet.

Shih-Wei Liao received the bachelors degree in computer science degree from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, in 1991, 1995, and 2000, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with the National Taiwan University. He was at the Silicon Valley (Stanford, Google, and Intel) for more than 20 years, culminating at receiving the Googles Highest Award and the Founders Award.

Chu-Sing Yang is a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. He received the B.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from National Cheng Kung University in 1976 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, as an Associate Professor in 1988. Since 1993, he has been a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University. He was the chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University from August 1995 to July 1999, and the director of the Computer Center, National Sun Yat-sen University from August 1998 to October 2002. He was the Program Chair of ICS-96 and Program Co-Chair of ICPP-2003 and MTPP-2010. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, as a Professor in 2006. He participated in the design and deployment of Taiwan Advanced Research and Education Network and served as the deputy director of National Center for High-performance Computing, Taiwan from January 2007 to December 2008. His research interests include future classroom/meeting room, intelligent computing, network virtualization.

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Autonomous and malware-proof blockchain-based firmware update platform with efficient batch verification for Internet of Things devices

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Current firmware updating mechanism for IoT devices

Security requirements and cryptographic preliminaries

Proposed blockchain-based firmware updating platform

Security analysis and performance simulation

Prototype implementation

Conclusions

Declaration of interests

Acknowledgement

Blockchain-based dynamic key management for heterogeneous intelligent transportation systems

IEEE Internet Thing J

Transitions: recommendation for transitioning the use of cryptographic algorithms and key lengths

Technical report

Short signatures from the weil pairing

J Cryptol

Modeling flash crowd performance in peer-to-peer file distribution

IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst

Dynamic software updating using a relaxed consistency model

IEEE Trans Softw Eng

Robustness, security and privacy in location-based services for future IoT: a survey

IEEE Access

Introducing ethereum and solidity

Untangling blockchain: a data processing view of blockchain systems

IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng

To blockchain or not to blockchain: that is the question

IT Prof

Blockchains for smart cities: a survey

Security in Smart Cities: Models, Applications, and Challenges