Blockchain-Based Continued Integrity Service for IoT Big Data Management: A Comprehensive Design

Abstract

The state-of-the-art centralized Internet of Things (IoT) data flow pipeline has started aging since it cannot cope with the vast number of newly connected IoT devices. As a result, the community begins the transition to a decentralized pipeline to encourage data and resource sharing. However, the move is not trivial. With many instances allocating data or service arbitrarily, how can we guarantee the correctness of IoT data or processes that other parties offer. Furthermore, in case of dispute, how can the IoT data assist in determining which party is guilty of faulty behavior. Finally, the number of Service Level Agreement (SLA) increases as the number of sharing grows. The problem then becomes how we can provide a natural SLA generation and verification that we can automate instead of going through a manual and tedious legalization process through a trusted third party. In this paper, we explore blockchain solutions to answer those issues and propose continued data integrity services for IoT big data management. Specifically, we design five integrity protocols across three phases of IoT operations—during the transmission of IoT data (data in transit), when we physically store the data in the database (data at rest), and at the time of data processing (data in process). In each phase, we first lay out our motivations and survey the related blockchain solutions from the literature. We then use curated papers from our surveys as building blocks in designing the protocol. Using our proposal, we augment the overall value of IoT data and commands, generated in the IoT system, as they are now tamper-proof, verifiable, non-repudiable, and more robust.