A Lightweight Stochastic Blockchain for IoT Data Integrity in Wireless Channels

Abstract

Trustworthy validators selection is crucial as validators determine whether a block should be added to its chain. In this article, we proposed a novel confidence score-based lightweight stochastic blockchain for wireless Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The received signal strength is used to define the trust level of a wireless IoT node to facilitate the selection of more trustworthy validator nodes, thereby reducing the possibility of selecting malicious validators. We used a lightweight authentication protocol called Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic to prevent unauthorised information leakage. A formal security analysis of BAN logic is provided for proving secure and fresh data storage. Our analysis and simulations reveal that the probability of successful defense against data integrity attacks (i.e., the probability that the majority of the validator nodes are not compromised) can be improved up to two times higher than that associated with the closest competitive scheme of random selection in stochastic blockchains. Our results further reveal that the probability of successful defense depends on the total number of nodes in the network and the number of validator nodes. The proposed blockchain concept can be easily implemented in various wireless IoT environments to enhance the successful defense of the system for maintaining IoT data integrity.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• data integrity
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• network security