Novel trust consensus protocol and blockchain-based trust evaluation system for M2M application services

Abstract

The increasing number of intelligent Machine-to-Machine Communication (M2M) devices in the end-user domain provide good resources for creating and sharing M2M application services. Therefore, transferring the role of a traditional centralized service provider to decentralized peers (end-users) acting as service providers is very promising. However, the future of decentralized M2M application services which are independently provided or consumed by several end-users in the M2M community depends on trust. Untrustworthy peers trying to deploy malfunctioning services for others mitigate the benefits of decentralized systems. Nowadays, the concept of distributed ledger and blockchain has an increased popularity regarding trustless computing among communities operating without centralized authorities. This research publication provides a comprehensive analysis and approach merging the concepts of M2M application services, trust and distributed ledger technologies. Moreover, this publication presents an optimized Trust Evaluation System which is used to ensure trustworthiness among peers in a M2M community. To improve the Trust Evaluation System the integration of blockchain for data storage is introduced. Additionally, blockchain technology is used to extend the existing trust model of the Trust Evaluation System to enable tamper-proof data and detection of untrustworthy peers. This publication reviews several existing approaches in the academic and industry sector to highlight the limitations of the blockchain regarding the consensus and proposes a novel Trust Consensus Protocol. This research publication also provides a practical evaluation of the proposed protocol.