Secure Drone Identification with Hyperledger Iroha

Interet-of-Things (IoT) devices such as drones are becoming more prevalent, but still have blatant security issues. DRIP is a newly proposed protocol for drones that aims to enable users to securely identify drones and trust in messages sent by them. However, some implementation details, such as registries, are yet to be determined. The decentralization, auditability and persistency of blockchain makes it a great candidate to be used as a registry in DRIP. This paper analyzes how Hyperledger Iroha, a permission-based blockchain framework, can be used to fulfill the registry requirements in DRIP, and propose an architecture using it as a registry. Findings show that, thanks to its support for various permissions, multi-signature transactions, and smart contracts, it is able to not only fulfill the requirements, but also enhance other security details of the proposed architecture. Furthermore, this paper also evaluates the performance of Iroha, with results showing that its low consensus delay is adequate to be used for real-time location updates.