Badge: Blockchain-Assisted Secure Authenticated Data Transmission in Mobile Edge Computing

In mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, data is frequently transmitted between MEC servers and mobile devices for supporting related services. However, critical threats towards data confidentiality and authenticity are raised, where adversaries always attempt to extract data content from the transmission and impersonate others to spread malicious data for profits. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based authenticated data transmission scheme, dubbed Badge, to establish secure channels between MEC servers and mobile devices. Badge is based on a blockchain-based authenticated hybrid encryption mechanism, which frees MEC servers from maintaining devices’ certificates and allows them to encrypt/decrypt a large volume of data in a highly efficient way. We present security analysis to demonstrate that Badge achieves data confidentiality and authenticity. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation to demonstrate that Badge is efficient and practical to deploy.