Private Blockchain Envisioned Access Control System for Securing Industrial IoT-Based Pervasive Edge Computing

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is able to connect machines, analytics and people with IoT smart devices, gateway nodes and edge devices to create powerful intuitivenesses to drive smarter, faster and effective business agreements. IIoT having interconnected machines along with devices can monitor, gather, exchange, and analyze information. Since the communication among the entities in IIoT environment takes place insecurely (for instance, wireless communications and Internet), an intruder can easily tamper with the data. Moreover, physical theft of IoT smart devices provides an intruder to mount impersonation and other attacks. To handle such critical issues, in this work, we design a new private blockchain-envisioned access control scheme for Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC) in IIoT environment, called PBACS-PECIIoT. We consider the private blockchain consisting of the transactions and registration credentials of the entities related to IIoT, because the information is strictly confidential and private. The security of PBACS-PECIIoT is significantly improved due to usage of blockchain as immutability, transparency and decentralization along with protection of various potential attacks. A meticulous comparative analysis exhibits that PBACS-PECIIoT achieves greater security and more functionality features, and requires low costs for communication and computational as compared to other pertinent schemes.

Keywords

• Industrial Internet of Things (IoT)
• edge computing
• blockchain
• access control
• key agreement
• security