DecChain: A decentralized security approach in Edge Computing based on Blockchain

Security in edge computing paradigms has become a major concern in recent times due to the integral role it plays in the framework of edge computing. Privacy-preserving and data security challenges are among the many concerns impeding the goal of making data storage available and processing at the edge of the network quite difficult to implement. Authenticated users must be the only ones with access to their respective stored data which are protected against any form of intruder manipulation. Most authentication schemes proposed and implemented in edge computing and other paradigms use a trusted entity to initialize the authentication process between edge servers and prospective users. Servers and users are expected to register with the trusted party first before they are able to subsequently authenticate one another. The presence of the trusted party presents scalability issues as well as the threat of having a single point of failure which may threaten the availability of the entire network. In this paper, we present a fully decentralized approach to solving this problem by eliminating the public trusted entity within the network framework termed DecChain. In DecChain we employ some notable principles of permissioned blockchain technology in the rollout and authentication of elements within the network. Authenticated users within our proposed framework would not have to sign in to every service provider to be authenticated to access a service or resource. Security experiments and the deployment of our scheme are carried out to evaluate the performance of DecChain. The results show our scheme is secured and achieves the intended purpose efficiently. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.