The core IOTA protocol itself is purposefully lightweight and simple in nature; its role is to enable trust free and fee-less transactional settlements as well as tamper proof data transmission. That’s it. Staying true to universal engineering principles we reduce trade-offs through the philosophy of modularity. Instead of creating a one size fits all swiss-army knife which invariably leads to mediocre performance in each feature, we instead make the IOTA platform modular. This means that each component is a stand alone application that is optimized for its purpose, without trading off performance or functionality for other applications. Additionally, this gives users of IOTA choice to tailor their usage of the protocol, instead of imposing the overhead of the features on, even if they originally only need to use one of them for instance. Both of these components are imperative for a scalable and functional platform.

Identity of Things

In order for IoT to securely mature into its full potential we have to fundamentally change how we think about machines/devices. Rather than perceiving them as lifeless amalgams of metal and plastic with a specific purpose, we need to shift toward considering each device as its own identity with different attributes.

For instance a sensor should not only have its unique identifier, but also accompanying it attributes such as: who manufactured it, when it was deployed, what is the expected life time cycle, who owns it now, what kind of sensor data is it gathering and at what granularity, does it sell the data and if so for how much? This is imperative for an efficient way to index and enable the Machine Economy and Industry 4.0 predictive maintenance. IDoT equally plays a vital role in securing the connected world. When each device has its own ID one can also establish reputation systems that are vital for anomaly and intrusion detection. By observing whether a device is acting in accordance with its ID or not, the latter which can be indicative of malware being spread, the neighbouring devices can quarantine it.

Status: At the present we are in the preliminary stages of researching and conducting ideation with developers and leading Industry and IoT actors on how such an identity system is to be comprised. It is vital that IDoT becomes a standard, as such input from as many as possible is a necessity. One thing is clear however: IOTA’s ledger will serve the role of ensuring that the device’s attributes and reputation is tamper-proof.

A future blogpost will delve deeper into IDoT.

Permanodes

Since IOTA uses “snapshotting” to keep the size of the Tangle ledger database small, which is a prerequisite for IoT. This is all that is necessary for the vast majority of settlement and data integrity use cases. However, there are certain applications where the full raw data of the ledger has to be kept and be accessible permanently, for instance a transparent audit will require such an ability. This is the role of ‘Permanodes’. A Permanode stores the entire Tangle history and data in it permanently and securely. Through checkpointing in snapshots we make it possible to completely remove the trust requirements.

Stage: Alpha Testing

Flash Network

At the moment IOTA and IoT is in a early phase of what we consider to be a ‘transition period’ toward a production ready deployment and IoT environment. Until the network grows considerably, and beyond that the IoT landscape starts adopting DLT natively with hardware support, which will give IOTA for all practical purposes unlimited throughput, payment channels will serve a role for use-cases which require very rapid high throughput of transactions. The Flash Channels has clear benefits over similar initiatives such as Lightning and Raiden due to the unique Tangle architecture. These include no fees to setup channels, making it suitable for nano-transactions, as well as the fact that there are no miners in Tangle and thus no need to worry about transactions expiring before they are included into blocks.

Status: Mid-stage development

Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM)

One of the most anticipated, and probably one of the most unique, modules for IOTA is Masked Authenticated Messaging. MAM makes it possible for sensors and other devices to encrypt entire data streams and securely anchor those into the IOTA Tangle in a quantum proof fashion. Only authorized parties will be able to read and reconstruct the entire data stream. In essence it works a lot like a radio where only those with the right frequency can listen in, in MAM only those with the right channel IDs get access to the data. You can expect many more announcements about MAM, as well as its applicability to industries such as Supply Chain, Banking and Industry 4.0.

Stage: Beta Testing

Private Transactions

Just like MAM is providing security and privacy for data sharing, Private Transactions is there for transactional privacy. Transactions carry a lot of meta-information that reveal private information, this is amplified in certain IoT use cases, therefore a Private Transaction layer is in development. We will use token shuffling to achieve this in the first round, but are also exploring more extensive technologies such as zero knowledge proofs.

Stage: Early development

Oracles

One of the main ways to extend the utility and applications of IOTA is through oracles. Through this one can feed outside data, such as timestamps, into the IOTA network. You can expect some exciting announcements here.

Stage: Advanced development