A Secure, Reliable and Low-Cost Distributed Storage Scheme Based on Blockchain and IPFS for Firefighting IoT Data

In the fire scene investigation, the firefighting Internet of Things (IoT) data is the key electronic evidence for event analysis and responsibility determination. However, the traditional centralized storage method leads to data easy to be tampered with and damaged. To solve these problems, this paper designs and implements a secure, reliable and low-cost distributed firefighting IoT data storage scheme based on the Fabric framework, combining blockchain technology, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm to provide a strong support for fire accident traceability. This scheme mainly includes the storage model, key algorithms and Fabric construction and improvement. IPFS stores the complete firefighting IoT data, as the off-chain storage system of the blockchain, and the blockchain only stores the storage address (IPFS hash) of data returned by IPFS, thus reducing the storage space overhead of the blockchain and ensuring data security. Further, we adopt the Fabric framework as the blockchain platform for firefighting IoT data, and embed the PBFT consensus algorithm into the framework to ensure the reliability of consensus nodes in Fabric, thus improving the availability of the blockchain. In addition, we use the AES and RSA algorithms to ensure the security of firefighting IoT data storage and transmission. Through system analysis and experimental testing, the proposed scheme meets the need for secure storage and traceability of firefighting IoT data. Compared with the storage scheme using only blockchain, the blockchain combined with IPFS technology has advantages in storage space occupation, significantly improved throughput, and lower latency overhead. Meanwhile, compared with the official Fabric, the improved Fabric supports Byzantine fault tolerance and has better security.