Hierarchical Multipath Blockchain Based IoT Information Management Techniques for Efficient Distributed Processing of Intelligent IoT Information

Abstract

As cloud technology advances, devices such as IoT (Internet of Things) are being utilized in various areas ranging from transportation, manufacturing, energy, automation, space, defense, and healthcare. As the number of IoT devices increases, the safety of IoT information, which is vulnerable to cyber attacks, is emerging as an important area of interest in distributed cloud environments. However, integrity techniques are not guaranteed to easily identify the integrity threats and attacks on IoT information operating in the distributed cloud associated with IoT systems and CPS (Cyber-Physical System). In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based integrity verification technique in which large amounts of IoT information processed in distributed cloud environments can be guaranteed integrity in security threats related to IoT systems and CPS. The proposed technique aims to ensure the integrity of IoT information by linking information from IoT devices belonging to subgroups in distributed cloud environments to information from specific non-adjacent IoT devices and blockchain. This is because existing techniques rely on third-party organizations that the data owner can trust to verify the integrity of the data. The proposed technique identifies IoT information by connecting the paths of IoT pre- and subsequent blocks into block chains so that synchronization can be achieved between subgroups in distributed cloud environments. Furthermore, the proposed technique uses probabilistic similarity information between IoT information blocks to react flexibly to subgroups that constitute distributed clouds so that IoT information blocks are not exploited maliciously by third parties. As a result of performance evaluation, the proposed technique averaged 12.3% improvement in integrity processing time over existing techniques depending on blockchain size. Furthermore, the proposed technique has to hash the IoT information that constitutes a subgroup with probability-linked information, validating the integrity of large-capacity IoT information, resulting in an average of 8.8% lower overhead than existing techniques. In addition, the proposed technique has an average improvement of 14.3% in blockchain-based integrity verification accuracy over existing techniques, depending on the hash chain length.