FairShare: Blockchain Enabled Fair, Accountable and Secure Data Sharing for Industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) opens up a challenging research area towards improving secure data sharing which currently has several limitations. Primarily, the lack of inbuilt guarantees of honest behavior of participating, such as end-users or cloud behaving maliciously may result in disputes. Given such challenges, we propose a fair, accountable, and secure data sharing scheme, FairShare for IIoT. In this scheme, data collected from IoT devices are processed and stored in cloud servers with intermediate fog nodes facilitating computation. Authorized clients can access this data against some fee to make strategic decisions for improving the operational services of the IIoT system. By enabling blockchain, FairShare prevents fraudulent activities and thereby achieves fairness such that each party gets their rightful outcome in terms of data or penalty/rewards while simultaneously ensuring accountability of the services provided by the parties. Additionally, smart contracts are designed to act as a mediator during any dispute by enforcing payment settlement. Further, security and privacy of data are ensured by suitably applying cryptographic techniques like proxy re-encryption. We prove FairShare to be secure as long as at least one of the parties is honest. We validate FairShare with a theoretical overhead analysis. We also build a prototype in Ethereum to estimate performance and justify comparable results with a state-of-the-art scheme both via simulation and a realistic testbed setup. We observe an additional communication overhead of 256 bytes and a cost of deployment of 1.01 USD in Ethereum which are constant irrespective of file size.