LRCoin: Leakage-Resilient Cryptocurrency Based on Bitcoin for Data Trading in IoT

Abstract

Currently, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices making up the IoT is more than 11 billion and this number has been continuously increasing. The prevalence of these devices leads to an emerging IoT business model called Device-as-a-service, which enables sensor devices to collect data disseminated to all interested devices. The devices sharing data with other devices could receive some financial reward, such as Bitcoin. However, side-channel attacks, which aim to exploit some information leaked from the IoT devices during data trade execution, are possible since most of the IoT devices are vulnerable to be hacked or compromised. Thus, it is challenging to securely realize data trading in IoT environment due to the information leakage, such as leaking the private key for signing a Bitcoin transaction in Bitcoin system. In this paper, we propose LRCoin, a kind of leakage-resilient cryptocurrency based on bitcoin in which the signature algorithm used for authenticating bitcoin transactions is leakage-resilient. LRCoin is suitable for the scenarios where information leakage is inevitable, such as IoT applications. Our core contribution is proposing an efficient bilinear-based continual-leakage-resilient ECDSA signature. We prove the proposed signature algorithm is unforgeable against adaptively chosen messages attack in the generic bilinear group model under the continual leakage setting. Both the theoretical analysis and the implementation demonstrate the practicability of the proposed scheme.