![](bg8.png)
whether and in which form to use blockchains for IoT
settings. In two cases, already existing evidence sup-
ported the result of applying our framework, which
demonstrate the validity of the framework. In one
case, we have presented a company that could ben-
efit from blockchain to increase the level of security
and traceability.
6 RELATED WORK
With the emergence of blockchains, many organiza-
tions have seen its potential for increasing trust, se-
curity, and privacy in digital transactions. However,
blockchains are not a silver bullet that will automati-
cally resolve any security-related issue. In the follow-
ing, we look at previous attempts to identify or char-
acterize scenarios in which the use of a blockchain
would be adequate (and in which it would not be).
[W
¨
ust and Gervais, 2017] describe different classes
of application scenarios and how to take advantage
of blockchain technology in these classes. They
also provide a framework for analyzing scenarios and
making the decision on whether to use blockchains
or not. [Xu et al., 2016] view blockchains as a soft-
ware connector and investigated real-world scenarios
in terms of design decisions and quality measures that
help in choosing a blockchain platform. A more gen-
eral view is taken by [Xu et al., 2017] and [Macdon-
ald et al., 2017]. The former present a taxonomy of
blockchain-based systems, while the latter compare
five general-purpose blockchain platforms, focusing
on criteria such as usability, flexibility, performance,
and, briefly, security. However, all these findings
cover general environments, not IoT specifically. In
our work, we use the existing studies as a basis and
address the specific needs of IoT.
7 CONCLUSION
Deciding whether to use a blockchain in an IoT set-
ting is not an easy question to answer. Although
blockchains offer advantages in terms of trust, secu-
rity, and privacy, there are also downsides in terms of
overheads or performance issues. A positive answer
to this first question immediately leads to a follow-up
question: which platform/system should we use?
In our work we illustrate how blockchains can
contribute to making IoT a safer and more trustworthy
place. Additionally, we developed a decision frame-
work to guide a potential user when making the deci-
sion whether to use blockchains and choosing a par-
ticular platform and system. We have also shown how
blockchain technology is already leveraged by com-
panies in their IoT operations. These use cases al-
lowed us to demonstrate the usefulness of our frame-
work.
As future work, we plan to develop and refine this
decision framework further into a recommender tool
that takes a wider range of categories into account.
Security needs, for instance, can be subdivided. In
IoT settings, concerns such as (sensor) data prove-
nance are important as a specific aspect. The anal-
ysis of more use cases would also be helpful. How-
ever, not many application scenarios are properly doc-
umented at this stage.
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