Blockchain-Based Anonymous Data Sharing With Accountability for Internet of Things

Abstract

Blockchain has been a promising infrastructure for enabling secure data sharing for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the widespread of IoT applications, security issues, such as data privacy, anonymity, and accountability become critical concerns for the users, which are essential principles for secure communication in those applications. However, the existing blockchain-based data-sharing schemes mainly consider data privacy. Only a few works can support anonymity with strong, trusted assumptions. Thus, there is a research gap on the anonymity of blockchain-based data sharing for IoT, which does not rely on any trusted party. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous data-sharing scheme (BA-DS) by adopting a novel public key encryption derived from a ring signature. In BA-DS, we remove the trusted party and ensure anonymity by using an unconditional linkable ring signature and Signature of Knowledge (SoK). During the revocation, we apply blockchain infrastructure to record the valid revocation list and generate a tag for data stored on the cloud, providing solid accountability. The formal security analysis shows that BA-DS is selective indistinguishable secure in the random oracle model. Additionally, we also prove that BA-DS holds anonymity, data privacy, accountability, and authenticity. The extensive experiments indicate that our proposed BA-DS achieves reasonable efficiency in terms of computational complexity, communication overhead, and consumption on the blockchain.