Review of Ethereum: Smart home case study

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in various domains, which are home, agricultural, healthcare, tourism, transportation and education. The more of its development, the more we need to consider about its security and privacy issues. In this paper, we consider smart home system (SHS) as a case study. SHS is an integration of home appliances together with sensors to get automatic operations of heating, lighting, air conditioning, home security, health care systems, etc. Moreover, SHS allows homeowner to monitor and perform appliances functions remotely at any instant time via the Internet. Due to the widespread availability and proliferation of the SHS, attackers can impersonate as a homeowner to steal important data (e.g., vital signs) for doing extortion and life threatening. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach of private Blockchain implementation for SHS to cope of its privacy and security issues. We review Ethereum Blockchain packages for SHS according to its smart contract features for handling access control policy, data storage and data flow management.