DAGSec: A hybrid distributed ledger architecture for the secure management of the Internet of Things

• Published in: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain) pp. 266 - 271
• Main Authors: Alvarenga, Igor D., Camilo, Gustavo F., De Souza, Lucas A. C., Duarte, Otto Carlos M. B.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2021
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; blockchain; Cloud computing; Computer architecture; Directed acyclic graph; Distributed ledger; edge and cloud computing; Internet of Things (IoT); next generation networks; Scalability; Upper bound
• DOI: 10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00043

The rise of 5G mobile broadband networks creates new possibilities for the Internet of Things. Billions of devices will provide comprehensive services, including e-health applications, smart grids, and industry 4.0. Distributed ledger technologies solve most security and privacy threats of current IoT systems connected to a cloud or multi-access edge communication (MEC). Unfortunately, the volume of transactions imposed by 5G networks prevents blockchain-based solutions due to scalability issues. Nonetheless, emerging solutions based on directed acyclic graphs (DAG), still require some form of centralization or global view. This article proposes DAGSec, a hybrid distributed ledger architecture that provides a secure Internet of Things environment with high throughput and low latency. Our proposal uses directed acyclic graphs and local transaction validation instead of global transaction validation to attain a high transaction rate. Furthermore, we propose a blockchain-based witness system to approximate chronological order of independent transactions.