A Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Enhancing Scalability and Security in IIoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology is widely used in modern industrial fields like transportation, but data security remains a major challenge. The blockchain-based access control mechanism can address the data security issue by preventing unauthorized devices from accessing limited IIoT resources. However, most existing blockchain-based access control mechanism for IIoT still has scalability and privacy issues. To deal with the above-mentioned problems, we propose a new scalable and secure strategy for the blockchain-based access control framework for IIoT via sharding, which consists of two components. First, the network sharding scheme based on the access frequency set (N2SAF) is designed to 1) improve the scalability of our proposed strategy by transaction sharding to reduce the storage pressure on nodes, and 2) increase the transaction processing speed on a three-layer architecture based on cloud-edge-device in IIoT. Second, the privacy protection scheme based on a Bloom filter (P2BF) is designed to deal with the privacy leakage problem caused by anonymous address clustering. Simulation results show that our proposed strategy improves the scalability of the system compared to existing methods while ensuring the security of the shard network, especially in large-scale IIoT environments.