Modeling and evaluation of consortium based blockchain consensus protocols for IOT data security and privacy

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) networks have been evolving phenomenally over the past two decades. Although the devices generally hold relatively low memory, resource and processing capability, the challenge with its trend is that nodes generate a vast volume of data. That is where cloud technology kicks off to offer storage space. An extensive network functioning with cloud assistance might be vulnerable due to its centralized nature and robustness. Besides, the devices may be exposed to malicious activities due to weak access control policies. However, cloud technology provides a platform on which such a security system can execute. Within the framework of these criteria, a centralized, secure architecture fails to consider the mobile and edge devices. This raises many questions about the trust in third-party cloud intermediaries that cause security and privacy leakages. The focus of this research study is to investigate the problem of Consensus algorithms of blockchain architecture towards its applicability in the IoT with cloud-native infrastructure in the variants of MultiChain and Quorum. The notable challenge is to scale the core layer without losing decentralization, security and public verifiability. Such a testbed is adopted to study the impact of architectural design and consensus models in lightweight IoT ambience. Three individual studies are conducted from different perspectives to design a trust-based storage and sharing mechanism that betters the model in existence. newline