Integration of IoT with blockchain and homomorphic encryption: Challenging issues and opportunities

The advancement of new technology has taken a huge leap in the last few decades. It is bringing a drastic change in each step of human life that are capable of performing intelligent tasks. The internet of things and blockchain are disruptive technologies that have received a huge attention from industry, academic and financial technologies. There is a risk of privacy leakage of sensitive information in the centralized IoT system because the centralized servers can access the plain text data from the IoT devices. There is an extensive interest in applying the blockchain in the IoT system to provide IoT data privacy and decentralized access model. However, the previous blockchain-based IoT systems have issues related to privacy leakage of sensitive information to the servers as the servers can access the plaintext data from the IoT devices. So, we present the potential of integration of blockchain based-IoT with homomorphic encryption that can secure the IoT data with high privacy in a decentralized mode. In addition, we provide comparison of the recent technologies toward the securing and preserving the privacy of the IoT data using blockchain and homomorphic encryption technology. We have also highlighted the research challenges and possible future research directions in the integrated blockchain-based IoT with homomorphic encryption.