Preface

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that has enabled connection and communication between both virtual and physical objects, thereby improving our quality of life. The definition of IoT has evolved because of the convergence of numerous technologies such as embedded systems, commodity sensors, machine learning, and real-time analytics. IoT contributes towards the concept of connected vehicles, connected health, wearable technology, home automation, and appliances having remote monitoring capabilities. Even though these systems provide numerous advantages, the current centralized architecture brings forth numerous issues related to privacy, security, transparency, data integrity, and single point of failure. This, in turn, inhibits the future development of these IoT-based applications. Further, the radical digitization of industry coupled with the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has set up a paradigm shift for industrial and manufacturing companies. Owing to these issues, it becomes necessary to integrate IoT with a distributed ledger technology. Blockchain technology, an immutable, shared, distributed ledger, is the most suitable choice for a variety of reasons. It stores the various transaction information in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and promotes information sharing among the network users. Owing to the fault tolerance capabilities, decentralized architecture and cryptographic security benefits such as authentication, data integrity, pseudonymous identities, security analysts and researchers consider blockchain to resolve privacy and security issues of IoT. The use of hash functions, timestamps, and sophisticated cryptographic algorithms in blockchain technology enables a secure computing environment and provides a tamper-proof ledger that can safeguard against possible attacks. Also, blockchain is used in numerous applications such as healthcare, intelligent transportation, supply chain management, identity management, voting, and maintaining government records. Due to these reasons, blockchain is considered the most disruptive and emerging future technology that will provide numerous opportunities to various industries. The emerging and promising state-of-the-art IoT and blockchain technology motivated us to propose this book, focusing on various aspects of IoT and blockchain systems like trust management, identity management, security threats, and access control and privacy. The book provides a comprehensive discussion on integrating the IoT system with blockchain technology, highlights the benefits of integration, and how blockchain technology resolves the issues of IoT systems.