StorSec: A Comprehensive Design for Securing the Distributed IoT Storage Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) networks have penetrated our daily life and industries. However, IoT devices are typically small-sized with constrained storage. Distributed storage systems are emerging as promising solutions to tackle such challenges. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a desired framework enabling IoT devices to upload its data to a distributed cloud while returning a hash-ID for downloading and file-sharing purposes. Nevertheless, IPFS lacks of robust security design and is vulnerable to security threats such as data tampering, and data leakage. In particular, whenever device A’s file hash-ID is shared to an arbitrary device B, device A will fully lose the control over file. In other words, device B could further share it to anyone without device A’s agreements. To conquer the challenge, we propose a comprehensive design for securing the distributed IoT storage systems, named StorSec. Specifically, we design a new heterogeneous framework using an improved attribute encryption algorithm to eliminate the single-point performance bottleneck problem, which not only realizes fine-grained access control and ensures the security of data during transmission, but also improves the performance of key generation. Secondly, we design an anomaly detection algorithm, which is based on hashchain technology and combines the user privacy metadata stored on the blockchain to complete the verification process, effectively protecting the file hash identifier, ensuring access control to the file, and thus providing protection for the security and integrity of data storage. Furthermore, we design an auditing algorithm that helps the system in tracking malicious entities. Ultimately, the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme are evaluated by both security analysis and experimental results.