BoSMoS: A Blockchain-Based Status Monitoring System for Defending Against Unauthorized Software Updating in Industrial Internet of Things

摘要

The role of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in critical infrastructure sectors, such as power, chemistry, and manufacturing, will be increasingly important as we move toward Industry 5.0. For example, IIoT devices are deployed in factories to help the manufacturing companies (e.g., automotive) gain in-depth insight into the various states of production, and thus improving production efficiency and achieving cost reductions. However, malicious code may compromise IIoT devices if either the devices are exposed to outside or unexposed inner devices are updated unauthentically. Due to their limited resources and features, it is challenging to implement strong security solutions for such embedded devices. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based software status monitoring system, called BoSMoS. The system is designed to monitor the software status of IIoT devices to detect and respond to identified malicious behaviors (e.g., intrusions). BoSMoS takes a snapshot of the statue of monitored software and monitors its file system calls. In order to ensure the software integrity information, we use blockchain as the distributed ledger to store a snapshot of software status. The blockchain network of BoSMoS can employ different consensus algorithms. We also evaluate the performance of BoSMoS, in terms of exception response delay, resistance performance to various intrusions, and scalability. The experimental results justify that BoSMoS is practical and sound. In addition, the evaluation of scalability and security demonstrates that the system can carry deployment of large-scale IIoT devices and can guarantee authenticated software updating, as well as detect unauthorized software status.