Secure Targeted Message Dissemination in IoT Using Blockchain Enabled Edge Computing

TL;DR

The paper tackles secure, targeted message dissemination in IoT by integrating a CP-ABSC-based signcryption scheme with a permissioned blockchain and edge computing. It leverages a bilinear pairing framework with the map $e: \mathbb{G}_1 \times \mathbb{G}_2 \rightarrow \mathbb{G}_3$ and the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption to achieve anonymous authentication, confidentiality, and fine-grained access control for device groups. The authors define a semi-trusted edge-centric system model, present an adversary framework, and provide a working prototype showing that cryptographic operations incur modest overhead on lightweight IoT devices. The work contributes a novel combination of CP-ABSC, a POA-based permissioned blockchain, and edge storage to deliver auditable, tamper-resistant, and scalable targeted dissemination for IoT applications.

Abstract

Smart devices are considered as an integral part of Internet of Things (IoT), have an aim to make a dynamic network to exchange information, collect data, analysis, and make optimal decisions in an autonomous way to achieve more efficient, automatic, and economical services. Message dissemination among these smart devices allows adding new features, sending updated instructions, alerts or safety messages, informing the pricing information or billing amount, incentives, and installing security patches. On one hand, such message disseminations are directly beneficial to the all parties involved in the IoT system. On the other hand, due to remote procedure, smart devices, vendors, and other involved authorities might have to meet a number of security, privacy, and performance related concerns while disseminating messages among targeted devices. To this end, in this paper, we design STarEdgeChain, a security and privacy aware targeted message dissemination in IoT to show how blockchain along with advanced cryptographic techniques are devoted to address such concerns. In fact, the STarEdgeChain employs a permissioned blockchain assisted edge computing in order to expedite a single signcrypted message dissemination among targeted groups of devices, at the same time avoiding the dependency of utilizing multiple unicasting approaches. Finally, we develop a software prototype of STarEdgeChain and show it's practicability for smart devices. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/mbaqer/Blockchain-IoT

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The considered IoT system model.
• Figure 2: The construction of permissioned blockchain presented in this work.
• Figure 3: The experimental setup of our proposed architecture with permissioned blockchain.
• Figure 4: Performance analysis in terms of time consumption with different access policies and attribute sizes