Nowadays, we are surrounded by a large number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and sensors. These devices are designed to make life easier and more comfortable. Blockchain technology, especially its mass application, is becoming a term number one. Adoption of blockchain into enterprise networks still has a few challenges that need to be tackled. Utilizing blockchain can bring increased security and efficiency of network maintenance. The key feature of the blockchain, immutability, brings resistance to unauthorized modifications. The whole history of device configuration changes is stored in the blockchain, hence recovery after incidents is very straightforward. This paper extends our previous studies. We are introducing an improved architecture for management and monitoring of IoT devices using a private blockchain. The majority of the system is built on a chaincode, which handles CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations as well as encryption and access control. Device configuration files are stored in the blockchain. When a modification occurs, the device downloads a new configuration in a simple manner. The chaincode receives notification whether setup was successful and this history is available for administrators. Our results show that such a system is possible and dissemination of configuration changes to IoT devices can be secured by the blockchain. The key novelty of our solution is a distributed management of configuration files of IoT devices in enterprise networks utilizing blockchain technology. This is essentially improving security and storage options for configurations in the blockchain.

The whole Internet consists of thousands of autonomous systems that transfer data with one another. The BGP plays a significant role in routing, but its behaviour is essentially naive, trusting neighbours without authenticating advertised IP prefixes. This is the main reason why BGP endures various path manipulation attacks. Recently, conventional methods for securing BGP have been implemented, i.e., BGPSec with RPKI. However, these approaches are centralised with a single point of failure that may be compromised, invalidating the whole security mechanism. There have been multiple decentralised projects dealing with various mechanisms, mostly built on Ethereum and blockchain networks. Some with ambition to strengthen existing centralised mechanisms, others to replace them. In this article, we present the first comprehensive survey on blockchain solutions to enforce BGP security, with complex explanations of their contributions and a comparison with different aspects. We explain how blockchain technology can provide an alternative to prevent the false origin of IP prefixes or hijacking AS paths. Moreover, we describe new blockchain-based attacks that BGP would face after the inclusion of blockchain into the inter-domain routing. Finally, we answer the defined research questions and discuss the potential open issues for further study.

Communication on the Internet consisting of a massive number of Autonomous Systems (AS) depends on routing based on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Routers generally trust the veracity of information in BGP updates from their neighbors, as with many other routing protocols. However, this trust leaves the whole system vulnerable to multiple attacks, such as BGP hijacking. Several solutions have been proposed to increase the security of BGP routing protocol, most based on centralized Public Key Infrastructure, but their adoption has been relatively slow. Additionally, these solutions are open to attack on this centralized system. Decentralized alternatives utilizing blockchain to validate BGP updates have recently been proposed. The distributed nature of blockchain and its trustless environment increase the overall system security and conform to the distributed character of the BGP. All of the techniques based on blockchain concentrate on inspecting incoming BGP updates only. In this paper, we improve on these by modifying an existing architecture for the management of network devices. The original architecture adopted a private blockchain implementation of HyperLedger. On the other hand, we use the public blockchain Ethereum, more specifically the Ropsten testing environment. Our solution provides a module design for the management of AS border routers. It enables verification of the prefixes even before any router sends BGP updates announcing them. Thus, we eliminate fraudulent BGP origin announcements from the AS deploying our solution. Furthermore, blockchain provides storage options for configurations of edge routers and keeps the irrefutable history of all changes. We can analyze router settings history to detect whether the router advertised incorrect information, when and for how long.