Australian telco Telstra uses blockchain to protect smart home IoT devices

Rage Review : Australian telecommunications company Telstra is trying to combine blockchain and biometric technology to protect the security of IoT devices in smart home centers. Although many problems were found during the series of tests, it is still possible to achieve this goal by combining other technologies. According to the preset situation, the code-based IoT will have the best cost-effectiveness in the future. Australia Post, which is currently owned by the Australian government, is also actively involved in blockchain research and development.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Katherine Robins, chief security expert at Australian telecommunications company Telstra, said the company is combining blockchain and biometrics to protect smart home IoT devices.

Robins said that after testing Ethereum, Hyperledger and Ripple blockchains, it is possible to find solutions for small-capacity storage devices using blockchain IoT.

Telstra first tested the ADSL T-Gateways before developing a range of smart home products.

“We sign the firmware, run a cryptographic hash of that firmware and the full configuration, and then monitor that against the blockchain,” Robins said at the Telstra Vantage 2016 conference in Melbourne, Australia.

Private blockchains can help you make the solution as simple as possible. Anyone who knows Bitcoin knows how long it takes to add something to the blockchain, more than 10 minutes. If it is a permissioned blockchain and there are fewer users, it can be faster; and if you don't add anything and just do the hashing, it's almost instant.

We have real-time tamper-proof protection and environment. So we tried to tamper with the hash value and see how long it takes for the system to notice the anomaly, and it turns out it takes less than a second.

The success of the tamper-proof experiment led Telstra to expand the blockchain trial to most IoT devices in the smart home, including switches and cameras. Robins said that as the trial progressed, she began to worry about security issues, or more precisely, the lack of authentication mechanisms.

"If you want to run a smart home environment, you need to run apps on the device."

“If there is malware on the device, the phone will be hacked and there will be no way to verify that I am still controlling the phone. So we started adding personal identity, and for that we started using biometrics, using facial recognition and voice recognition, and binding fingerprints to the blockchain so that they cannot be tampered with.”

Robins said that by adding biometrics to the app and testing it with blockchain, users can verify their identity.

This completes the entire system, with activities on the device having the tamper-proof function of blockchain, and biometric technology used to determine who is logging into the device at a certain time and place.

Blockchain makes the entire IoT device more secure and efficient, increasing the cost-effectiveness of the organization.

"If the IoT system we launch does not use blockchain and you need to write secure code, you will need to use digital security certificates."

"So there's the need to manage and revoke certificates, and that brings a lot of bad things, like increased costs."

IoT testing is performed on low-power networks.

“Obviously IoT is about low-bandwidth networks, so making sure we’re not consuming a lot of bandwidth and can run on low-power networks so that we can keep the signature and data packet sizes to a minimum.”

In June, Telstra released 10 smart devices and the Telstra Smart Home hub; the devices include smart light bulbs, window sensors, door sensors, wide-beam motion sensors, smart plugs, Lockwood smart door locks, smart thermostats, outdoor WiFi cameras, indoor WiFi cameras, and smart home hubs.

Telstra says the future of the Internet of Things will use narrowband networks.

Robins said the company is also looking at using blockchain for legal network interception, environmental sensor monitoring, automotive safety, agriculture, network operations, fraud, compliance, auditing and electronic voting.

Last month, Australia Post also mentioned a similar blockchain e-voting project.

In a filing with the Victorian Electoral Matters Committee, the Post said community expectations were driving the development of electronic voting and it was looking forward to the success of its first blockchain project.

"The emergence of cryptocurrency in the form of blockchain highlights the potential of re-purposing technology to capture digital transactions in an immutable, distributed and secure way," said Tim Adamson, head of Australia Post.

“Apart from cryptocurrencies, voting is by far the most ideal use case for blockchain technology.”

Adamson said blockchain could provide a tamper-proof solution, while earlier in August Australia Post accelerator partner Rick Wingfield said blockchain could enable physical authentication.

"When we think about blockchain, we don't want to put private information on a public ledger because that would quickly attract a lot of scammers and hackers; even if the data is encrypted, it's not a good idea."

"However, we believe that this technology can give citizens more control over their data, and the infrastructure that contains two keys can allow citizens to encrypt their data. Whether it is the government or a company that owns the data, two keys are required to unlock it."