Blockchain-Enabled Data-Sharing Scheme for Consumer IoT Applications
Bowen Hu, Yingwen Chen, Hujie Yu, Linghang Meng, Zhimin Duan
Abstract
A staggering number of consumer Internet-of-Things devices are being deployed in various application scenarios, and massive data will be generated per day. How to achieve a secure and efficient data-sharing scheme for the consumer IoT applications is a huge challenge for us. The traditional cloud-based IoT has the dilemma of prolonged communication delay and privacy leakage. With the application of 5G technology, edge computing can effectively alleviate these problems. However, it cannot meet the higher security requirements for the data sources’ authenticity and information reliability. By combining the blockchain and smart contracts technology, this article proposes a distributed, efficient, and secure data-sharing scheme centered on consumer IoT devices. This architecture consists of four layers: 1) IoT devices layer, 2) edge storage layer, 3) blockchain network layer, and 4) application services layer. We design smart contracts based on the attributed based access control and the searchable encryption algorithm, including device retrieval contract, policy management contract, and authorization verification contract. Through the implementation of simulated experiments, we prove that our proposed architecture can satisfy the large-scale data access requests and bring a tolerable level of communication overhead. The proposed framework is one of the few attempts to leverage the edge computing and blockchain technologies to support IoT data sharing.