BCRS-DS: A Privacy-protected data sharing scheme for IoT based on blockchain and certificateless ring signature

The Internet of Things (IoT) has created opportunities for collaboration across organizations and domains through data sharing. However, existing data sharing schemes in IoT face challenges, including privacy breaches, inefficiency, and lack of incentives. To address these issues, blockchain is a promising infrastructure for data sharing due to its decentralization, auditability, and immutability. This paper proposes a novel data sharing scheme based on blockchain and certificateless ring signature (BCRS-DS), which utilizes the certificateless ring signature algorithm to protect the privacy of participants and improves the authentication efficiency. Moreover, BCRS-DS integrates a decentralized anonymous incentive mechanism based on zero-knowledge proof. After completing the data sharing process, participants can provide the zero-knowledge proof data to the smart contract to demonstrate their eligibility for rewards without compromising the privacy. Finally, we verified the effectiveness and practicality of BCRS-DS through theoretical analysis and experiments.