Bring Trust to Edge: Secure and Decentralized IoT Framework with BFT and Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

While our society accelerates its transition to the Internet of Things, billions of IoT devices are now linked to the network. While these gadgets provide enormous convenience, they generate a large amount of data that has already beyond the network’s capacity. To make matters worse, the data acquired by sensors on such IoT devices also include sensitive user data that must be appropriately treated. At the moment, the answer is to provide hub services for data storage in data centers. However, when data is housed in a centralized data center, data owners lose control of the data, since data centers are centralized solutions that rely on data owners’ faith in the service provider. In addition, edge computing enables edge devices to collect, analyze, and act closer to the data source, the challenge of data privacy near the edge is also a tough nut to crack.A large number of user information leakage both for IoT hub and edge made the system untrusted all along. Accordingly, building a decentralized IoT system near the edge and bringing real trust to the edge is indispensable and significant. To eliminate the need for a centralized data hub, we present a prototype of a unique, secure, and decentralized IoT framework called Reja, which is built on a permissioned Blockchain and an intrusion-tolerant messaging system ChiosEdge, and the critical components of ChiosEdge are reliable broadcast and BFT consensus. We evaluated the latency and throughput of Reja and its sub-module ChiosEdge.