A Secure and Computable Blockchain-Based Data Sharing Scheme in IoT System

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) devices are expected to collect vast amounts of data that support different kinds of applications such as health monitor, smart home, and traffic management. However, its characteristics such as resource-constrained nature, dynamicity, and large-scale growth bring challenges to secure IoT data sharing. Nowadays, blockchain-based ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) was proposed to realize secure IoT data sharing. In blockchain-based CP-ABE data sharing schemes, the data are encrypted and stored in the cloud. Once users want to process the data, they should download and then decrypt the ciphertext in the client-end, and after processing the data, users encrypt and upload the ciphertext onto the cloud. This outweighs the advantage of using cloud computing resources. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and homomorphic signature technology may be adopted to realize ciphertext computation and for correctness checking of ciphertext computation results. In this paper, we propose a secure and computable IoT data sharing system to ensure users enjoying the computation convenience of the cloud-end. Specifically, the proposed system integrates CP-ABE and FHE to realize secure IoT data sharing and ciphertext computation. In addition, we generated homomorphic signatures of ciphertexts to enable users to check the correctness of the ciphertext computation results. Moreover, to supervise the cloud, providing the honest IoT data access control, storage, and computing services for users, we recorded the access policy of the data, the hash of the data, the signature of the ciphertext, and the homomorphic signature of the ciphertext on the blockchain. The performance evaluation and security analysis show the proposed scheme is practical and secure.

A Blockchain-Centric IoT Architecture for Effective Smart Contract-Based Management of IoT Data Communications

“…A searchable reference to the data is created and then mined to the blockchain network. The proposed work in [33] was based on realizing computable blockchain-based IoT data communications based on ciphertext computation. For successful IoT communication, IoT data collected by IoT devices need to be firstly encrypted using fully homomorphic encryption on an edge server before being signed using a signature algorithm on a cloud server.…”

“…These include the direct blockchain-device interaction [27,32,36], the need for additional entities [35], and the support of only local intra-cluster communications [31]. Other considerations are the complexity introduced by the cloud-based blockchain communication [28], multi-blockchain architecture [29,30], cloud-based ciphertext computation [33], federated learning-integrated approach [34], and multi-smart contract design [39][40][41]. It is evident that there is still notable room for further research and development in this emerging area.…”

BlockGov: Blockchain-Based Data Governance in the Internet of Things using Smart Contracts

“…A decentralized IoT data management strategy based on blockchain that employs smart contracts to allow secure information sharing and access control was suggested by Sun et al [12]. The authors used the Ethereum blockchain and Solidity smart contracts to implement their proposed approach.…”

A Blockchain-Based Real-Time Power Balancing Service for Trustless Renewable Energy Grids

“…Blockchain-based systems perfectly fit these needs [3], allowing a fully decentralized system to work and trust between parties to hold, without requiring any previous agreement on a common trust authority to guarantee that no one will tamper with the recorded data and computations. Blockchain-based solutions have, thus, been widely applied in the literature for the design of the next generation of distributed applications in a variety of different application domains, all sharing the common requirement of enabling Internet users or IoT devices to safely trade information and resources across untrusted environments and networks [4][5][6][7]. On the other hand, while blockchains and smart contracts are a powerful tool to automatically enforce the rules governing the interaction amongst mutually untrusted parties, their expressive power in terms of coordination ability, while rapidly evolving, is still limited [8].…”