Secure Data Sharing: Blockchain-Enabled Data Access Control Framework for IoT

As Internet-of-Things (IoT) service becomes richer, data sharing among different IoT systems gets popular. The traditional IoT system provides data storage and access service with the central cloud, which faces serious trust and security challenges. To provide a cross-system data sharing service, we adopt blockchain to build a multicenter data management (DM) framework and construct a trustable environment for data sharing. As regards to a security problem, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been applied to the IoT system, but it still relies on the central server. Therefore, we design an ABE algorithm that could be used for multicenter scenario and shift DM to blockchain instead of a central server. Moreover, IoT devices always cannot afford complex encrypt computations as they have limited computing resource. To solve this, we design an obfuscating policy to shift encryption computations to the cloud instead of terminals. In this way, IoT devices could encrypt data with low computation cost. Security analysis and simulations prove that the algorithm we designed could reduce computation burdens of IoT terminals in data encryption and decryption phases effectively and safely.

Automated summary

As IoT services become more advanced, data sharing among different IoT systems is increasingly popular. To address the trust and security challenges faced by traditional IoT systems that rely on central clouds for data storage and access, we propose a multicenter data management framework based on blockchain to create a trusted environment for data sharing. We also introduce an attribute-based encryption algorithm that can be used for multicenter scenarios and shift the data management to blockchain instead of a central server. Additionally, we design an obfuscating policy to offload encryption computations to the cloud, reducing the computational burden on IoT devices.