Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Trust Management and Secure Usage Control of IoT Big Data

Abstract

With the fast development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, IoT big data and its applications are getting more and more useful. However, traditional IoT data management is fragile and vulnerable. Once the gathered data are untrusted or the stored data are tampered with deliberately from the internal users or attacked by an external hacker, then the tampered data have a serious problem to be utilized. To solve the problems of trust and security of IoT big data management, in this article, we propose a permissioned blockchain-based decentralized trust management and secure usage control scheme of IoT big data (called BlockBDM), upon which all the data operations and management, such as data gathering, invoking, transfer, storage, and usage, are processed over the blockchain smart contract. To encourage the IoT client to supply high-quality content, in our scheme, we design public-blockchain-based tokens reward mechanism for the high-quality data supply contribution. All the data processing and usage procedure can be recorded in a cryptography-signed and Merkle tree-based transaction(s) and block(s) with high-level security in a global and distributed ledger with tamper resistance. For data utilization and consumption, we propose secure usage control for digital rights management and token-based data consumption approach of high-value data from being violated or spread without any limitation. We implemented the BlockBDM scheme based on public and permissioned blockchain for IoT big data management. Finally, a large amount of evaluation manifests that the proposed BlockBDM scheme is feasible, secure, and scalable for decentralized trust management of IoT big data.