User-Oriented Selections of Validators for Trust of Internet-of-Thing Services

Due to energy efficiency and near real-time finality settlement, permissioned blockchain is mainly used in blockchain-based Internet of Things (BIoT) services. This blockchain requires validators to reach the consensuses. Currently, the validators are chosen based on generic attributes of trusted nodes capriciously. However, service users have no mechanism to provide their requirements in assessing validators. Existing works are biased from users’ perspectives, which risks collusion attacks due to improperly selected validators. This article aims to solve this by considering users’ expectations on services. A user-oriented framework is proposed to evaluate the trust of BIoT services with the consideration of validator attributes. It provides an effective mechanism to express requirements. Specification language is adopted in our algorithm to perform compliance checking. The feasibility has been verified in a simulation. We found that the permissioned blockchain has also benefited from the proposed user-oriented selection of validators in terms of computing efficiency due to additional constraints.