Blockchain-Based Secure Data Storage Protocol for Sensors in the Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that introduces Internet of Things (IoT) technology into industrial environments is beneficial to construct smart factories. It utilizes various sensors to collect the data of industrial devices. These data are analyzed to improve the manufacturing efficiency and product quality. Cloud storage provides a solution for storing data outsourced, especially for sensors that have limited local storage and computational capacity. To ensure the privacy preserving of devices, the collected data should be stored in the formal ciphertext. Therefore, encrypted data sharing should be implemented to analyze the devices’ data. In this article, the cloud storage solution for sensors is considered. To achieve a secure and efficient data storage and sharing, a novel group signature scheme, which has less computation overhead and communication overhead, is designed to realize anonymous authentication first. And then, a novel blockchain-based cloud storage protocol for sensors in IIoT is constructed on basis of the proposed group signature scheme. Smart contract and proxy re-encryption are utilized in this protocol to realize secure data sharing with a less computational overhead. Furthermore, security proofs and performance evaluations demonstrate that this protocol is secure, privacy-preserving, and has at least 40% and 20% performance improvement in data storage and sharing phase, respectively.