Securing the Internet of Things Network using a Hierarchical Hyperledger Fabric Model

Smart contracts in the Blockchain were initially applied in the financial services domain and later, incorporated into the Internet of Things (IoT) networks because the Blockchain can complement the IoT networks by boosting the benefits through the modularity of the network and peer-to-peer connections. In this paper, we aim to address the issue that prevents the widespread adoption of Blockchain technology in the IoT network, and more specifically, we want to address the case where there is no need for all the IoT devices to communicate with each other. Such cases can be related to smart grids, smart homes and smart cities, and also, smart vehicles to a lesser extent. All of these cases mostly have a central authority, which requires a means to communicate with its clients securely. Our proposed solution makes use of a hierarchical approach to the Blockchain on the IoT network so that we can control the size of the ledger that each sub-network would require. Our solution makes use of Hyperledger Fabric, which is a free and open-source Blockchain framework and helps resolve the ledger size, and cost issues that plague many of the existing solutions in the literature without compromising on the main benefits of the Blockchain. As such, the proposed model enhances the integrity, authorization, and authentication of the communication between the IoT devices in the network. With this in mind, the metaverse requires IoT devices like sensors to interact with the real world. Hence the need to securely manage the sensor swarm is of high importance.