Towards Trustworthy IoT: A Blockchain-Edge Computing Hybrid System with Proof-of-Contribution Mechanism

The emerging smart city is driving massive transformations of modern cities, facing the huge influx of sensor data from IoT devices. Edge computing distributes computing tasks to the near-edge end, which greatly enhances the service quality of IoT applications, that is, ultralow latency, large capacity, and high throughput. However, due to the constrained resource of IoT devices, currently, systems with a centralized model are vulnerable to attacks, such as DDoS from IoT botnet and central database failure, which can hardly provide high-confidence services. Recently, blockchain with a high security promise is considered to provide new approaches to enhancing the security of IoT systems. However, blockchain and IoT have obvious incompatibility, and low-capacity IoT devices can hardly be incorporated into blockchain with high computing requirements. In this paper, a blockchain-edge computing hybrid system (BEHS) is presented to make the adaptation of blockchain to edge computing and provide trustworthy IoT management services for a smart city. A novel extensible consensus protocol designed for proof-of-work, named proof-of-contribution (PoC), is proposed to regulate the data upload behaviors of nodes, especially the data upload frequency of IoT device nodes, so as to protect the system from attack about frequency. In order to secure the data privacy and authenticity, a data access control scheme is designed by integrating symmetric encryption with asymmetric encryption algorithm. We implemented a concrete BEHS on Ethereum, realized the function of PoC mechanism via smart contracts, and conducted a case study for smart city. The extensive evaluations and analyses show that the proposed PoC mechanism can effectively detect and automatically manage the behavior of nodes, and the time cost of data access control scheme is within an acceptable range.