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Abstract

The IoT devices deployed in various application scenarios will generate massive data with immeasurable value every day. These data often contain the user’s personal privacy information, so there is an imperative need to guarantee the reliability and security of IoT data sharing. We proposed a new encrypted data storing and sharing architecture by combining proxy re-encryption with blockchain technology. The consensus mechanism based on threshold proxy re-encryption eliminates dependence on the third-party central service providers. Multiple consensus nodes in the blockchain network act as proxy service nodes to re-encrypt data and combine converted ciphertext, and personal information will not be disclosed in the whole procedure. That eliminates the restrictions of using decentralized network to store and distribute private encrypted data safely. We implemented a lot of simulated experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed architecture can meet the extensive data access demands and increase a tolerable time latency. Our scheme is one of the essays to utilize the threshold proxy re-encryption and blockchain consensus algorithm to support IoT data sharing.

۱٫ Introduction

With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, massive IoT devices have been deployed to different application scenarios. A fantastic amount of data is generated every day all over the world by these devices [1]. Data are the core concept of IoT technology, and these data are of inestimable value in different applications. Although IoT seems to be very attractive, its advances have brought new challenges to security and privacy. Consequently, there is an imperative need to guarantee the reliability and security of IoT data sharing [2].

IoT data sharing has played a vital role in smart cities, healthcare, vehicular networks and other application fields [3]. Figure 1 depicts a popular data sharing architecture. The data producer domain contains a series of sensors and other devices that can collect data directly. The data owners generate and manage a large amount of IoT data. Due to the limited storage capacity of IoT devices, these massive data need to be encrypted and uploaded to a third party for storage, which is convenient for data management, distribution and sharing. They can encrypt the data and upload them to the storage service providers, such as cloud servers and distributed file systems for storage. The ownership of the data belongs to the data owner domain. In order to facilitate the sharing of data with other users, access rights are usually bound to the encrypted data itself and outsourced to storage service providers for management. Therefore, it is necessary to establish an effective access control mechanism to ensure the privacy and security of data owners, but this task is usually quite challenging. Data sharing depends on semi-trusted storage service providers, and they may have incentives for trying to read the data. At the same time, the process of authentication and revocation of data access rights is also opaque to the data owners.