28

Blockchain Technology

3.1  INTRODUCTION

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has enabled straightforward communication,

efficient work environments, associated improved living and hastened innovation.

At the same time, cyber security has become the prime need of today’s world, and

even new age technologies like IoT, smart technologies and information technology

infrastructure management are not untouched by it (K. K. and Sharma, 2013). Any

sort of vulnerability in the exclusions may be precisely the type of attack vector that

leads to cyber-attack on IoT-based technologies. There are lots of vulnerabilities and

attack vectors in this technology, which makes it insecure.

The speedy growth of Blockchain technology has affected our daily lives in every

way. A study by the research and analysis firm Gartner (Gartner, 2017) guesstimated

that “Blockchain technology will add $3.1 trillion in business value by the Year

2030”. In an alternative investigation, the comprehensive worldwide IoT market is

anticipated to grow $457 billion by 2020 (Sharma et al., 2017), from $157 billion

in the year 2016. IoT is steadily cultivating itself in grade and potential to become

one of the most ubiquitous technologies at present. According to one more study by

Gartner, there will be upwards of 20 billion connected devices by the end of 2020

(Kishore & Sharma, 2016), from around 8 billion at the end of 2017.

3.1.1  Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is a tamper-proof digital ledger for any kind of data generation and prop­

agation. Any new data generated in this chain is known as a block. Whenever a fresh

block is created, it is common to every computer in the Blockchain peer-to-peer

network. To create a new block, the data is confirmed by every node in the network.

After the new data is verified by at least the first five network nodes, the data is

converted into blocks. Every block encompasses new records and the hash of the

previous block. Blocks are chained together using these hashes, and previous data is

conserved forever. The Blockchain network reunites every 10 minutes, recording all

the blocks created within these 10 minutes. There has been various research on the

Blockchain hypothesis. The concept of Blockchain was initiated with the publication

of a white paper authored by “Satoshi Nakamoto”, who presented a novel digital

currency system. This paper showed a technique with the help of which payments

could be transferred directly without any intermediate party like banks (Ahram

et al., 2017). Since then, researchers have investigated an assortment of facets of this

technology and executed it to design a variety of products for the digital world both

within and beyond financial transactions. In Singh & Singh (2016) and Treleaven

et al. (2017), the authors talked about the prospects of Blockchain in the financial

industry and discussed the most popular product of Blockchain, the bitcoin. There

are three logical layers in the Blockchain technology: The application, Blockchain

and data layers.

Application Layer: The application layer acts as an interface between the user

and the Blockchain infrastructure. It provides overlays for different protocols, appli­

cation programming interfaces (APIs) for programmers and platforms for end users.

It supports decentralized applications.