Whiteboard2Boardroom presents innovations from regional universities, hospitals, and research organizations to encourage commercialization.

1. SecuringEdge-loT Systems
Using Blockchain and Smart
Contracts
9/11/20

2. What is the problem?
• The fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) is facing
significant security and scalability challenges.
• Edge computing addresses scalability and provides
various benefits while is also with security concerns.
• Increasing IoT usage provides an attractive target for
criminals.

3. How does product/service solve problem?
• This technology addresses the security gap in a
scalable manner by leveraging proven, industrial-
grade technologies – blockchain and smart
contracts, which provide a secure and extremely
flexible means of protecting data and resources.
• The new ”EdgeChain” framework enables easy
integration of security-related features into Edge-IoT
systems.

4. How does product/service solve problem?
• EdgeChain integrates a permissioned blockchain and
an internal currency or “coin” system to link the edge
cloud resource pool with each IoT device’s account
and resource usage, and, hence, behavior.
• EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management
system to control how much resource IoT devices can
obtain from edge servers based on pre-defined
priority rules, application types, and past behavior.
– Smart contracts regulate the IoT device behavior.
– All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into
blockchain for secure data logging and auditing.

5. What is the market use?
• This technology is particularly beneficial in the critical
infrastructure space, e.g. oil & gas, manufacturing,
utilities etc., where a high level of security is needed.
• IoT service providers that need to manage and regulate
the behavior of many IoT devices (e.g., platform
providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft that
both offer cloud services and manage industrial IoT
applications).
• IoT applications including emergency response,
augmented reality, video surveillance, speech
recognition, computer vision, and self-driving.

6. What competition exists?
• As of the patent application filing date, no existing
IoT management methods used blockchain and
smart contract for the purpose of managing large
number of IoT device behavior and resource usage.
• EdgeChain will lead to better security, better
automation, better accountability, and better
robustness for the IoT applications.

7. What competition exists?
• EdgeChain, using blockchain and smart contracts, provides
an extremely high level of security in an inexpensive,
flexible and scalable manner. Major advantages include:
– a new framework integrating the capabilities of permissioned
blockchain and smart contracts;
– an internal currency or coin system linking the edge-cloud resource
pool with IoT device accounts and resource-usage behavior;
– a credit-based resource management system to control how much
resources IoT devices can obtain from edge servers;
– a resource-oriented and smart-contracts-based policy enforcement
method to regulate IoT device behavior; and
– a prototype and experimentation validating the EdgeChain concept.

8. What is the status of the intellectual property?
• U.S. Patent application
16/383,291 entitled
"Method and System for
Secure Resource
Management Utilizing
Blockchain and Smart
Contracts" filed 04/12/2019.
• Publication No.
20190319861.

9. What is the stage of development?
• A working prototype has been developed with
extensive experimentation conducted to evaluate
and validate the concept.
• The results showed the expected gains in security
benefits of blockchain and smart contracts and that
the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is low.

10. What is needed for further development?
• Working with a commercial partner and real-
world data, a use-case will be developed to give
this technology context in the application of
choice.
• The University seeks to license to a startup or
established company to bring this technology to
market.

11. Questions?