Australian telecoms firm Telstra has said that a combination of blockchain and biometrics offers the best chances of securing IoT-enabled homes.The company is now piloting the combination, according to Katherine Robins, principal security expert at Telstra, reported ZdNet.Speaking at the Telstra Vantage 2016 conference in Melbourne, she said: “A private blockchain … gives you the ability to have that resolution time very, very short. Those of you who know anything about bitcoin knows that it can take a long time to attach something to the blockchain; it's in excess of 10 minutes. If you've got a permissioned blockchain, and it's a smaller user base, you get the ability to do it faster, and if you're not attaching a lot of data and you're just doing hashes, then it's almost immediate.””What we found is we had real-time tamper detection and tamper resistance on our environment. So we started looking at, 'OK, here's my hash of the configuration', and then I would go in and tamper with it, and see how quickly it noticed it was out of sync. It took less than a second.”By integrating biometrics into the app and the blockchain testing, Robins said users could then validate their identity.”This rounded it out for us — so we had our blockchain-backed tamper events on devices, and we had the ability to verify the identity of the person who was accessing the device at a point in time via biometrics.”According to Telstra's principal security expert, the use of blockchain makes security across IoT devices much more efficient and cost effective for organisations.”Let's say we didn't use blockchain and we were going to push out an IoT system today and you wanted to write security — you would have to push out digital security certificates to those,” Robins said.

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