Blockchain-based DNS and PKI to solve issues of trust, security and censorship in the context of the IoT

Abstract

The domain name system (DNS) and public key infrastructure (PKI) provide the core services for the Internet. The use of these systems requires trust in institutions to provide proper services, which they can fail to provide. Centralized management allows these institutions to perform censorship. Additionally, these legacy systems have seen numerous security issues over the years related to both network security and data security. The rise of the Internet of Things, often resource-constrained devices such as embedded sensors, has leveraged these services. But in doing so has exposed the IoT to the same flaws as the underlying infrastructure. To combat this, both non-blockchain-based and blockchain-based solutions have been proposed, both with their own issues. Non-blockchain-based solutions offer improvements in one dimension, such as trust, but at the cost of security. In comparison, blockchain-based solutions can offer improvements in multiple dimensions simultaneously as has been shown in proposed systems. Blockchain-based solutions deal with their own set of issues: they struggle with the adoption of such a system and lack compatibility with the resource-constrained IoT. To combat the issues of blockchain-based solutions, this paper proposes theoretical improvements on blockchain-based DNS and PKI solutions, building on work done in the field. These improvements address the interoperability with current systems to increase adoptability. Additionally, it offers a system architecture compatible with both the IoT and regular devices by leveraging different types of nodes for the blockchain network based on device constraints and needs.