BCPriPIoT: BlockChain utilized privacy-preservation mechanism for IoT devices

Abstract

Security and privacy are the primary concerns for IoT devices but because of their inherent limitation both in terms of processing and energy, IoT devices cannot be deployed at their full scale. To alleviate such security and privacy issues, the interaction of blockchain with IoT systems has acquired significant attention these days because blockchain has presented an underlying mechanism of immutability, audibility, and transparency for data storage. However due to the intrinsic nature of a blockchain containing complex mathematical proof concepts such as Merkle Hash Tree and Proof of Work (PoW) which demands high computation power making it less viable for IoT devices to be connected with. To overcome these issues, a novel scheme is proposed in this paper, which deploys private by design based blockchain architecture for IoT devices using low complex consensus algorithm and low computation cryptographic mechanism which suits best for IoT devices to address the privacy concerns. Unlike the traditional blockchain network in which every node maintained a copy of the transaction, we have proposed a new architecture in which block validation and block generation logic has been modified so that a transaction will be limited to the trusted recipient only. The proposed scheme outperforms the contemporary approaches both in terms of throughput and latency as observed through simulation results as well as maintaining the privacy concerns which will encourage the actual implementation of IoT applications in the real world. Moreover, the evaluation analysis demonstrate that the approach has major potential in a trusted network computing system and provides a substantial secure environment for IoT users.