Today the cloud plays a central role in storing, processing, and distributing data. Despite contributing to the rapid development of IoT applications, the current IoT cloud-centric architecture has led into a myriad of isolated data silos that hinders the full potential of holistic data-driven analytics within the IoT. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based design for the IoT that brings a distributed access control and data management. We depart from the current trust model that delegates access control of our data to a centralized trusted authority and instead empower the users with data ownership. Our design is tailored for IoT data streams and enables secure data sharing. We enable a secure and resilient access control management, by utilizing the blockchain as an auditable and distributed access control layer to the storage layer. We facilitate the storage of time-series IoT data at the edge of the network via a locality-aware decentralized storage system that is managed with the blockchain technology. Our system is agnostic of the physical storage nodes and supports as well utilization of cloud storage resources as storage nodes. With the emergence of networked embedded devices dubbed as the IoT, we are witnessing an ever increasing number of innovative applications. The current ecosystem of the IoT consists typically of designated low-power devices equipped with sensors collecting data. This data is then stored via special-purpose apps (i.e., application-layer gateways) in a third-party cloud storage for further processing. This stove-piped architecture [31] has resulted into isolated data silos, where users have limited control over their data and how it is used. Users have to trust the cloud and application providers
In REF , the authors proposed a distributed secure and private IoT data management platform using BC.
Towards Blockchain-based Auditable Storage and Sharing of IoT Data
CCSW '17
Computer Science