Privacy-preserving blockchain based IoT ecosystem using attribute-based encryption

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has penetrated deeply into our lives and the number of IoT devices per person is expected to increase substantially over the next few years. Due to the characteristics of IoT devices (i.e., low power and low battery), usage of these devices in critical applications requires sophisticated security measures. Researchers from academia and industry now increasingly exploit the concept of blockchains to achieve security in IoT applications. The basic idea of the blockchain is that the data generated by users or devices in the past are verified for correctness and cannot be tampered once it is updated on the blockchain. Even though the blockchain supports integrity and non-repudiation to some extent, confidentiality and privacy of the data or the devices are not preserved. The content of the data can be seen by anyone in the network for verification and mining purposes. In order to address these privacy issues, we propose a new privacy-preserving blockchain architecture for IoT applications based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) techniques. Security, privacy, and numerical analyses are presented to validate the proposed model.

Blockchain‐based security aspects in heterogeneous Internet‐of‐Things networks: A survey

“…The proposed system eliminated the need for a centralized access control server and the use of multiple management hub nodes distributed across the BC network improves the flexibility of the system Rahulamathavan et al also proposed a privacy‐preserving BC‐based IoT architecture . In this architecture, the processing and transmission of the recorded data are done by the cluster heads.…”

Blockchain-Based Threat Registry Platform

“…Compared to traditional systems, this one provides a much higher degree of transparency, privacy, traceability, immutability and availability with the cost of a slight reduction in processing speed. Other proposed systems use attributebased encryption along with blockchain technology to address the issues of privacy and confidentiality of data produced by an IoT network [45].…”

Challenges of Integrating Blockchain with Internet of Things

“…Blockchain delivers service layers for integrating with the typical IoT framework [25] [26]. Usually, the framework contains three essential roles which are sensor, miner and agent [27].…”

“…This comes to use when a morbid patient requires regular medical surveillance [25]. Hence the vitals of the patient can be uploaded for getting monitored by the concerned person even away from the patient [26].…”