ABE-Based Postquantum Cross-Blockchain Data Exchange Approach for Smart Agriculture

Development of Agriculture 4.0 brings higher demands for managing agricultural products. Blockchain technology can enhance the transparency, traceability, and security of the supply chain. Traditional single-blockchain model faces the scalability limitations. Therefore, we propose multilayer blockchain system for agricultural data management to enable the precise management in various aspects, such as supply chain tracing, land management, market transactions, and sustainability tracking. Interplanetary file system helps to alleviate the burden on data storage. Based on the characteristics of system data flow, we devise a post-quantum cross-blockchain data exchange approach using attribute-based encryption (ABE-PQCBCDEA). It solves the scalability problem and realizes fine-grained access control of different blockchain data, and it significantly reduces the size of ciphertext sets for ciphertext reuse. ABE-PQCBCDEA obtains the 42.6% improvement in the encryption and decryption efficiency compared with previous approaches, and its communication costs have been reduced by 48.5%, thereby it reduces the burden of cross-chain data exchange.