Title: Know your device: a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity management framework for IoT devices

Authors: Aguru Aswani Devi; Erukala Suresh Babu

Addresses: Department of CSE, SRM University AP, Amaravati 522240, Andhra Pradesh, India ' Department of CSE, NIT Warangal, Hanumakonda 506004, Telangana, India

Abstract: The internet of things (IoT) comprises billions of devices that communicate and exchange data through the internet. However, managing each device's registration, identification, and authentication information is challenging. In this paper, we have leveraged the efficient management of the self-sovereign identity of IoT devices using the blockchain network called 'know your device'. The blockchain validators act as identity-verifiers for the authenticated IoT devices through threshold-based signatures. The verifiers are elected in each tenure by a lightweight proof-of-voting consensus algorithm. As the off-chain mechanism, the interplanetary file system (IPFS) stores the registered IoT devices' identities and authentication credentials. We have performed the experimental result analysis of the proposed scheme on Hyperledger Fabric. Privacy, anonymity, and accountability are significant achievements of the proposed scheme. The results have proven the efficiency of our scheme in terms of lower execution time, lower smart contract deployment time, and higher transaction throughput than the state-of-the-art techniques.

Keywords: internet of things; self-sovereign identity; threshold signatures; authentication; blockchain; proof-of-voting consensus; privacy; anonymity; accountability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2025.146424

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2025 Vol.49 No.2, pp.129 - 141

Received: 12 Jul 2023
Accepted: 09 Aug 2024
Published online: 29 May 2025 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article