Three-tier Storage Framework Based on TBchain and IPFS for Protecting IoT Security and Privacy

Abstract

Recently, most of the Internet of things (IoT) infrastructures are highly centralized with single points of failure, which results in serious security and privacy issues of IoT data. Fortunately, blockchain technique can provide a decentralized and secure IoT framework to deal with security issues based on the characteristics of decentralization, non-tampering, openness, transparency, and traceability. However, the blockchain consensus protocol guarantees the safety and reliability of data, but it also brings problems such as scalability limitations and poor storage extensibility, resulting in the inability to directly integrate blockchain and the IoT in existing conditions. In this article, a private three-tier local blockchain, Three-tier architecture Blockchain (TBchain), is proposed to solve the problem by splitting part of the transactions in the public blockchain and locking them in a higher-level blockchain TBchain. Additionally, the private blockchain TBchain is connected to the public blockchain to build a hierarchical blockchain network to provide privacy protection for the IoT data stored on the blockchain. Finally, we implement an IoT framework based on TBchain and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to realize the decentralized IoT, which guarantees the user’s access control right to personal data. Experimental results show that the IoT framework based on TBchain and IPFS realizes the user’s access control right to personal data by verifying in advance to ensure the confidentiality and security of shared data, and improves the security and privacy of IoT data and transactions. Moreover, we prove that the scalability and storage extensibility of the blockchain is positively correlated with the number of data blocks in TBchain.