Blockchain technology can reconfigure and resecure the IOT system.

Cybersecurity spending has increased exponentially in the past decade, with no signs of slowing. Worldwide, organizations plan to allocate more than $1 trillion between 2017 and 2021 to protect themselves from online threats, according to one industry report.1

Despite that staggering investment, criminal hackers are still exploiting both publicly known and unknown vulnerabilities, and intercepting device, application, and network communications. CB Insights calculated that about 6 billion confidential files were stolen between 2017 and 2018. Other industry research shows that the number and cost of cyberattacks have increased.

These sophisticated assaults often outwit traditional security methods, including authentication, key management, cryptography, and privacy challenges. With a large percentage of employees working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, vulnerabilities are growing in new ways. So, instead of building more powerful tools, many businesses are rethinking the systems that created these vulnerabilities in the first place.

A new cybersecurity approach

Blockchain offers a different path toward greater security, one that is less traveled and not nearly as hospitable to cybercriminals. This approach reduces vulnerabilities, provides strong encryption, and more effectively verifies data ownership and integrity. It can even eliminate the need for some passwords, which are frequently described as the weakest link in cybersecurity.

The principal advantage of blockchain is its use of a distributed ledger. A dispersed public key infrastructure model reduces many risks associated with centrally stored data by eliminating the most obvious targets. Transactions are recorded across every node in the network, making it difficult for attackers to steal, compromise, or tamper with data, unless a vulnerability exists at the platform level.

Another traditional weakness is eliminated through blockchain’s collaborative consensus algorithm. It can watch for malicious actions, anomalies, and false positives without the need for a central authority. One pair of eyes can be fooled, but not all of them. That strengthens authentication and secures data communications and record management.

Although blockchain contains many nontraditional features, it does take advantage of one of the most important cybersecurity tools: encryption. The distributed ledger can utilize public key infrastructure to secure communication, authenticate devices, validate configuration changes, and discover confidential devices in an internet of things (IoT) ecosystem. Through encryption and digital signatures, a blockchain system can shield connected thermostats, smart doorbells, security cameras, and other vulnerable edge devices. A recent Palo Alto Networks report said that 98% of IoT device traffic was unencrypted and described it as “low-hanging fruit for attackers.”2

Also, this technology can be a weapon against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. A blockchain-based domain name system (DNS) — the protocol for directing internet traffic — can remove the single point that allows these attacks to succeed. In 2016, a large portion of the internet went down because of a DDoS attack on the servers of one DNS host.3