An Efficient Blockchain-based Firmware Update Framework for IoT Environment

Recently, massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has accelerated digital transformation of modern society in various aspects. Naturally, how to ensure security of deployed IoT devices has become an important and practical issue. Several successful large-scale DDoS attacks were utilized vulnerabilities of firmware on IoT devices in the past couple of years. Therefore, effective and efficient firmware update solution on IoT devices is in demand. In this study, an automatic real-time firmware update framework based on blockchain technology and MQTT protocol is proposed. To support automatic real-time firmware update operation on deployed IoT devices, multiple MQTT servers are installed in corresponding blockchain nodes to execute firmware patch delivery operation by the design of our framework. Blockchain technology is used to record the original manufacturer of a published firmware patch for a dedicated IoT device and smart contract is adopted to discover MQTT service nodes in a blockchain network. Data integrity of a newly generated firmware patch is preserved by distributing the patch with its hashed value. A framework prototype is constructed and experiments are conducted. Based on the experimental results, the proposed framework can efficiently and securely deliver firmware patches to targeted gateways in real-time scale.