NormaChain: A Blockchain-Based Normalized Autonomous Transaction Settlement System for IoT-Based E-Commerce

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT)-based E-commerce is a new business model that relies on autonomous transaction management on IoT-devices. The management system toward IoT-based E-commerce demands autonomy, lightweight, and legitimacy. As blockchain is an innovative technology that is competent in governing the decentralized network, we adopt it to design the autonomous transaction management system on IoT E-commerce. However, current blockchain solutions, most namely cryptocurrencies, have fatal drawbacks of nonsupervisability and huge computational overhead, and hence cannot be directly applied on IoT-based E-commerce. In this paper, we propose NormaChain, a blockchain-based normalized autonomous transaction settlement system for IoT-based E-commerce. By designing a special three-layer sharding blockchain network, we can significantly increase transaction efficiency and system scalability. Additionally, by designing an innovative decentralized public key searchable encryption scheme (decentralized public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) scheme), we can uncover illegal and criminal transactions and achieve crime traceability. Our new decentralized PEKS scheme cryptographically eliminates the dependence of a trusted central authority in the original PEKS scheme and instead expands it to a fully decentralized governance, which distributes the supervision power equally among all parties. More importantly, by proving NormaChain is secure against chosen ciphertext attacks and against the stealing of the secret key, we show that NormaChain prevents a legitimate user’s privacy from being violated by banks, supervisors or malicious adversaries. Finally, we deliver the NormaChain system with design details and full implementations. Experiments show that the average transaction-per-second on IoT devices is around 113, and the supervision accuracy is 100% when proper target illegal keywords are provided.