Pinocchio: A Blockchain-Based Algorithm for Sensor Fault Tolerance in Low Trust Environment

Abstract

As the advancement of the IoT market and technology, sensor-equipped devices belonging to different interest groups have more opportunities to cooperate, fulfilling an assignment. How to ensure an agreement on correct sensed data in such a low trust environment is a new challenge in nowadays market. To bridge the gap, we propose Pinocchio, a blockchain-based algorithm which can tolerate faults in WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) along with the ability to defend sensed data against malicious attacks of data tampering and masquerade. Compared to other distributed approaches of sensor fault tolerance, Pinocchio greatly reduced the message complexity of the entire network to $O(N)$ and that of a single node to $O(1)$. Considering the possible waste of resources brought about by vicious competition of hash power in the blockchain-based approach, we design the Geppetto algorithm to supervise and control hash power in a distributed manner, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by experiments.