Privacy-preserving blockchain based IoT ecosystem using attribute-based encryption

© 2017 IEEE. The Internet of Things (IoT) has penetrated deeply into our lives and the number of IoT devices per person is expected to increase substantially over the next few years. Due to the characteristics of IoT devices (i.e., low power and low battery), usage of these devices in critical applications requires sophisticated security measures. Researchers from academia and industry now increasingly exploit the concept of blockchains to achieve security in IoT applications. The basic idea of the blockchain is that the data generated by users or devices in the past are verified for correctness and cannot be tampered once it is updated on the blockchain. Even though the blockchain supports integrity and non-repudiation to some extent, confidentiality and privacy of the data or the devices are not preserved. The content of the data can be seen by anyone in the network for verification and mining purposes. In order to address these privacy issues, we propose a new privacy-preserving blockchain architecture for IoT applications based on attribute-based encryption (ABE) techniques. Security, privacy, and numerical analyses are presented to validate the proposed model.