[OpenTRV-dev] Blockchain for anti-tamper and non-repudiatiot of valuable IoT data

[Damon Hart-Davis]

> 
> In a chat with Viv today (helping us with out business plan, but also a blockchain whiz) the possibility of using a blockchain mechanism to provide at least these two features in the long-term data store came up.
> 
> I've been trying to understand blockchain to see if we could use it for our own purposes and I can't see how it would be used for that particular use case. If I understand things correctly, blockchain is a distributed ledger where every transaction is signed and all nodes have a full copy of the ledger. I think there are also variations to allow some nodes to only have a partial copy of the ledger.

The data would be authenticated from node to concentrator and then signed there.

> I'm not sure where this ledger would go: it can't be stored on the sensors nodes as they don't have the capacity for it and even concentrators would be hard pressed to deal with it. That leaves a data platform but doesn't that go against the OpenTRV principle of having something that can work without that data platform?

The long-term data store would be blockchain.  One copy with the factory/canteen/etc, one with auditors and one with (say) the H&SE.

This has various neat features about soft real-time alerts, multiple copies off-site and un-tamperable.

There are some issues of the speed of blockchain operations but there are possible solutions to that such as some simple batching.

Rgds

Damon