Blockchain for Large-Scale Internet of Things Data Storage and Protection

• Published in: IEEE transactions on services computing Vol. 12; no. 5; pp. 762 - 771
• Main Authors: Li, Ruinian, Song, Tianyi, Mei, Bo, Li, Hong, Cheng, Xiuzhen, Sun, Limin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-09-2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Blockchain; certificateless cryptography; Cloud computing; Cryptography; Data storage; Digital currencies; Edge computing; High density storage; Internet of Things; IoT; Memory; Miners; Public key; Servers; Transaction processing
• ISSN: 1939-1374; 1939-1374; 2372-0204
• DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2018.2853167

With the dramatically increasing deployment of IoT devices, storing and protecting the large volume of IoT data has become a significant issue. Traditional cloud-based IoT structures impose extremely high computation and storage demands on the cloud servers. Meanwhile, the strong dependencies on the centralized servers bring significant trust issues. To mitigate these problems, we propose a distributed data storage scheme employing blockchain and cetrificateless cryptography. Our scheme eliminates the traditional centralized servers by leveraging the blockchain miners who perform "transaction" verifications and records audit with the help of certificateless cryptography. We present a clear definition of the transactions in a non-cryptocurrency system and illustrate how the transactions are processed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work designing a secure and accountable IoT storage system using blockchain. Additionally, we extend our scheme to enable data trading and elaborate how data trading can be efficiently and effectively achieved.