Achieving Accountable and Efficient Data Sharing in Industrial Internet of Things

In this article, we propose an accountable and efficient data sharing scheme for industrial IoT (IIoT), named an accountable and data sharing scheme (ADS), in which a data owner can pursue the responsibility of a data receiver if the latter leaks some sensitive shared data to the public for profits while without permission (i.e., accountability). Specifically, ADS is built upon an adaptive decentralized oblivious transfer protocol together with a zero-knowledge proof technique, which enables the data receiver's private key to be hidden from the data owner and yet correctly embedded into the shared data during the process of data sharing. Once data breaches occur, the private key can be automatically revealed to the data owner so as to achieve the accountability. In addition, with ADS, a group of sharing providers can also assist IIoT devices in handling heavy computational tasks via the secret sharing technique without sacrificing the security. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted, and the simulation results demonstrate that ADS has high computational efficiency, making it well fit for IIoT.