Blockchain-based trust management for verifiable time synchronization service in IoT

With the rapid development of IoT, to manage the explosive growth of devices, time synchronization in IoT systems has become crucial. A traditional solution is to designate a trusted time relay to provide time synchronization service for IoT. However, due to internal errors or external attacks, time synchronization services in IoT are facing the single point of failure, leading to severe consequences such as downtime of IoT devices across domains. Some centralized time synchronization methods, such as NTP and PTP, rely on the correctness of the time server (master clock), which is vulnerable due to crashes, power failure or external attacks. Most distributed schemes are oriented towards crash fault-tolerant, but the reality of Byzantine nodes prevents these schemes from working as expected. In this paper, we propose a distributed and verifiable time synchronization scheme based on NTP, trust management and blockchain. we employ the public and verifiable blockchain to identify incorrect time synchronization. As the processes of synchronization are viewed as transactions within our blockchain, we design a consensus mechanism to resist Byzantine nodes based on trust management. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has achieved our expected efficiency and security goals.

Automated summary

With the rapid development of IoT, time synchronization in IoT systems has become crucial. This paper proposes a distributed and verifiable time synchronization scheme based on NTP, trust management, and blockchain. It utilizes a public and verifiable blockchain to identify incorrect time synchronization and employs a consensus mechanism based on trust management to resist Byzantine nodes.