Blockchain for Large-Scale Internet of Things Data Storage and Protection

TLDR

The rapid proliferation of IoT devices has made storing and protecting the massive volumes of generated data a critical challenge, as traditional cloud-based architectures impose high computational and storage demands and centralization raises trust concerns. This study proposes a distributed IoT data storage scheme that employs blockchain and certificateless cryptography to eliminate centralized servers and introduces an extension for efficient data trading. The scheme leverages blockchain miners to verify transactions and audit records using certificateless cryptography, defines non‑cryptocurrency transactions, and outlines their processing workflow. To date, this is the first work to design a secure and accountable IoT storage system based on blockchain.

Abstract

With the dramatically increasing deployment of IoT devices, storing and protecting the large volume of IoT data has become a significant issue. Traditional cloud-based IoT structures impose extremely high computation and storage demands on the cloud servers. Meanwhile, the strong dependencies on the centralized servers bring significant trust issues. To mitigate these problems, we propose a distributed data storage scheme employing blockchain and cetrificateless cryptography. Our scheme eliminates the traditional centralized servers by leveraging the blockchain miners who perform "transaction" verifications and records audit with the help of certificateless cryptography. We present a clear definition of the transactions in a non-cryptocurrency system and illustrate how the transactions are processed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work designing a secure and accountable IoT storage system using blockchain. Additionally, we extend our scheme to enable data trading and elaborate how data trading can be efficiently and effectively achieved.