Towards Trustworthy IoT: A Blockchain-Edge Computing Hybrid System with Proof-of-Contribution Mechanism

Abstract

The emerging smart city is driving massive transformations of modern cities, facing the huge influx of sensor data from IoT devices. Edge computing distributes computing tasks to the near-edge end, which greatly enhances the service quality of IoT applications, that is, ultralow latency, large capacity, and high throughput. However, due to the constrained resource of IoT devices, currently, systems with a centralized model are vulnerable to attacks, such as DDoS from IoT botnet and central database failure, which can hardly provide high-confidence services. Recently, blockchain with a high security promise is considered to provide new approaches to enhancing the security of IoT systems. However, blockchain and IoT have obvious incompatibility, and low-capacity IoT devices can hardly be incorporated into blockchain with high computing requirements. In this paper, a blockchain-edge computing hybrid system (BEHS) is presented to make the adaptation of blockchain to edge computing and provide trustworthy IoT management services for a smart city. A novel extensible consensus protocol designed for proof-of-work, named proof-of-contribution (PoC), is proposed to regulate the data upload behaviors of nodes, especially the data upload frequency of IoT device nodes, so as to protect the system from attack about frequency. In order to secure the data privacy and authenticity, a data access control scheme is designed by integrating symmetric encryption with asymmetric encryption algorithm. We implemented a concrete BEHS on Ethereum, realized the function of PoC mechanism via smart contracts, and conducted a case study for smart city. The extensive evaluations and analyses show that the proposed PoC mechanism can effectively detect and automatically manage the behavior of nodes, and the time cost of data access control scheme is within an acceptable range.

Systematic Literature Review of IoT Botnet DDOS Attacks and Evaluation of Detection Techniques

“…Many of the blockchain IoT detection techniques are being built using the Ethereum platform. In this paper [ 123 ], a Blockchain Edge computing Hybrid System (BEHS) is implemented to make use of blockchain along with edge computing and provide secure IoT services. To secure data privacy and authenticity, a data access control scheme is designed by integrating symmetric encryption with an asymmetric encryption algorithm.…”

“…[120] Collaborative Blockchain-Based Detection 2018 [121] AutoBotCatcher: Blockchain-based P2P Botnet Detection 2019 [122] Blockchain with SDN to prevent IOT botnets 2021 [123] Blockchain with Proof-of-Contribution Mechanism 2022 [124] Ethereum Blockchain Technology 2022 [125] Blockchain-Enabled Secure Digital Twin Framework 2022 [126] Blockchain-based Intrusion Detection System 2022 [127] Blockchain with Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System Shafi et al [122] introduce an innovative solution by combining the SDN with the distributed blockchain technique. The authors explain the changes in the architecture flow that can combine the distributed blockchain with the SDN technique.…”