Security Authentication Mechanism of Spatio-Temporal Big Data Based on Blockchain

Abstract

Spatiotemporal big data are a kind of data that marks time information and geographic location and has been widely applied in various fields. However, there are always security issues with spatiotemporal big data, especially in data collection and authentication. Traditional authentication protocols are less efficient in the face of ultra-large-scale IoT (Internet of Things, IoT) device verification, and the threat of single-point failure is relatively large. Given these complications, a group authentication scheme is proposed in this paper with blockchain spatiotemporal big data. The decentralization of the blockchain is utilized to solve the single point of failure, and the single-point authentication is combined with the group authentication, the authentication efficiency is improved through the group authentication, and the illegal nodes are accurately identified using the single-point authentication. The simulation results demonstrate that using the MHT (Merkel Hash Tree, MHT) algorithm for group authentication can effectively improve the authentication efficiency of the entire system when the number of users exceeds 200. The time overhead is only 4 ms when the number of users is 16,000. It can have a large throughput (400–500 tps) and a low latency (1–2 s) at the same time when the block size is 1500 KB. This study not only verifies the legitimacy of each device and protects the security of spatiotemporal big data, but also significantly reinforces the authentication efficiency compared with similar schemes.

Keywords

• spatio-temporal big data
• Internet of Things
• blockchain
• group authentication
• MHT