Design of secured blockchain based decentralized authentication protocol for sensor networks with auditing and accountability

Abstract

The traditional system designed by incorporating the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) suffers from important issues such as centralization of information, single source of trust, and fails to provide a trusted data-auditing solution due to the involvement of Third Party Auditor (TPA). This article proposes a novel solution by leveraging the concept of blockchain and Distributed Data Storage Service (DDSS) system to mitigate the issues mentioned above. In our model, the sensor nodes are accountable for their activity because the blockchain permanently records the logs of sensor nodes. The proposed solution provides the decentralized authentication of sensor nodes and the information stored in the fully distributed system. Furthermore, a decentralized data-auditing scheme without involving the TPA is also suggested, which finally benefits the user in terms of bandwidth and money. The formal verification of the proposed protocol is done using the Scyther simulator tool, which indicates that the protocol is safe and can protect against the relevant attacks with 100% accuracy. We have estimated the proposed scheme’s time complexity and computational efficiencies and compared them with the existing one. The computation and communication overhead of the proposed method is reduced by 22.143% and 12.5% compared with the Khalid et al. (2020) scheme. Lastly, the ethereum platform simulates our solution, confirming that less than USD 2 is required to execute the proposed solution.