Securing Environmental IoT Data Using Masked Authentication Messaging Protocol in a DAG-Based Blockchain: IOTA Tangle

Abstract

The demand for the digital monitoring of environmental ecosystems is high and growing rapidly as a means of protecting the public and managing the environment. However, before data, algorithms, and models can be mobilized at scale, there are considerable concerns associated with privacy and security that can negatively affect the adoption of technology within this domain. In this paper, we propose the advancement of electronic environmental monitoring through the capability provided by the blockchain. The blockchain’s use of a distributed ledger as its underlying infrastructure is an attractive approach to counter these privacy and security issues, although its performance and ability to manage sensor data must be assessed. We focus on a new distributed ledger technology for the IoT, called IOTA, that is based on a directed acyclic graph. IOTA overcomes the current limitations of the blockchain and offers a data communication protocol called masked authenticated messaging for secure data sharing among Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We show how the application layer employing the data communication protocol, MAM, can support the secure transmission, storage, and retrieval of encrypted environmental sensor data by using an immutable distributed ledger such as that shown in IOTA. Finally, we evaluate, compare, and analyze the performance of the MAM protocol against a non-protocol approach.