USING BLOCKCHAIN TO SUPPORT PROVENANCE IN THE INTERNET OF THINGS

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained traction in all sectors and pervades all spheres of our lives. With statistics projecting an increase in the number of devices by 87% as well as increase in security concerns, traceability within this IoT will become a major problem. As more devices communicate with each other via the Internet, it will be crucial to determine the origins of requests and responses. Being able to store records related to the life cycle of requests and responses in an immutable form will provide documentary evidence that will help to establish transparency and accountability within the IoT. Previous works employed provenance techniques to address this problem but focuses on the request perspective. However, little or nothing has been done regarding the response perspective. Consequently, this thesis proposes and develops a blockchain-based provenance system to trace bi-directionally the sources of requests and responses in the IoT. This is achieved through the investigation of historical communication records. Furthermore, a performance evaluation of the system is provided. The results show that the developed system is scalable under real-world setting