Decentralized blockchain based authentication for secure data sharing in Cloud-IoT

Abstract

Cloud integrated Internet of Things (Cloud-IoT) has gained huge attention over this decade. As millions of devices are connected over the internet, security becomes a more challenging issue in the Cloud-IoT environment. Many research works have contributed to ensuring security in Cloud-IoT. But none of the works has proven its security strength and efficiency. In particular, centralized authentication and complex encryption schemes increase the overhead even for low-level security. This paper proposes a novel Decentralized Blockchain-based Security (DeBlock-Sec) scheme, which is most suitable for resource-constrained IoT environment to abridge the security issue. The overall system works upon three significant phases, (1) authentication phase, (2) data encryption phase, and (3) data retrieval phase. For authentication, we propose a novel Decentralized Blockchain-based Authentication (DBA) protocol. The DBA protocol uses multiple factors to authenticate users and devices. In the next phase, data encryption is carried on the IoT devices. As the amount of data to be encrypted is large in size, the encryption is performed in the spark environment since the confidentiality of data is vital. The data retrieval phase allows users to access the data stored in the Cloud. Dendrimer Fractal Tree Indexing is followed to minimize the searching time and the Revised Diffie-Hellman algorithm is presented for key exchange. The extensive experiments performed in Spark environment show that the proposed work achieves better performance in terms of time consumption (encryption, decryption and search), storage space, and throughput. Our proposed technique is a promising research direction for real IIoT security.