Trustworthy IoT Data Streaming Using Blockchain and IPFS

Abstract

Today’s resource-constrained IoT streaming devices generate large amounts of data which is stored, processed, analyzed for value creation, and accessed using centralized systems, technologies, platforms, and services. Most existing systems leveraged for storing and accessing IoT streaming data fall short in providing transparency, traceability, reliability, trustworthiness, and security features. Also, they are vulnerable to the single point of failure problem due to centralization. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution for resource-constrained IoT streaming devices that allows data chunks to be transferred in a decentralized, transparent, traceable, reliable, secure, and trustful manner. We preserve the privacy and confidentiality of the IoT streamed data through a proxy re-encryption network. We use the decentralized storage of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to store and share the IoT streaming data, thereby dealing with the large-size data storage problem. We present system diagrams and eleven algorithms along with their full implementation details. We perform security analysis to show our smart contract code is secure enough against well-known security threats and vulnerabilities. We compare our proposed approach with the existing solutions to show its novelty and effectiveness. We make our smart contract code publicly available on the GitHub repository.

Keywords

• IoT
• data streaming
• IPFS
• blockchain
• Ethereum
• smart contracts