A blockchain-driven data exchange model in multi-domain IoT with controllability and parallelity

Abstract

With the extensive application of the Internet of Things (IoT), multi-domain IoT appears as the additional coordination and control ability of IoT. However, the emerging multi-domain IoT suffers from some security challenges, such as insider threats and cross-domain data exchange issues. In this paper, we propose a data exchange model for the multi-domain IoT environment driven by blockchain, addressing expensive cross-domain access control and low data exchange throughput issues. At the core of this model is a chaincode-based cross-domain access control scheme and a domain-as-a-shard (DaaS) high parallel throughput optimization technology. In particular, the access control scheme is maintained by multiple blockchain nodes to ensure access control strategy distributed storage and data cross-domain controllability. The data in this model cannot be exchanged across domains until all nodes jointly verify that the access control strategy is valid. Moreover, the throughput optimization technology sets the IoT domain as the blockchain shard to process data exchange in parallel and scale up the throughput dramatically. In each shard, data exchange is processed in the form of the blockchain transaction independently to improve the transaction throughput of our model. Finally, security analysis proves that our model successfully ensures access control strategy non-repudiation and cross-domain data controllability. Extensive experiments on Hyperledger Fabric show that the transaction throughput of our model is nearly three times that of the original Fabric v1.4.