Secure Blockchain Integration Approach for Knowledge Discovery in Industrial Internet of Things

The field of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is now being duly recognized as a revolutionary area in industrial automation. With the budding interest of knowledge discovery that helps the businesses in applying technology on a large scale, researchers are now faced with several major security concerns. Blockchain integration is one of the suggested applications of technology that could help secure the data during transmission, storage, and knowledge discovery. Moreover, by integrating smart contracts, a secure architecture could also assimilate accountability during data exchange. Thus, we propose a four-layer security architecture that isolates IIoT devices from user-oriented layers and maintains a record of all IIoT devices registered in the organization to prevent malicious devices from corrupting the database and discovery process. Further, by choosing proof of authority (PoA), we ensure the fair functioning of the Blockchain nodes. Through proxy re-encryption for clients, PoA consensus for Blockchain nodes, and Whitelist-based access control for IIoT Devices, we ensure the legitimacy of all participating nodes. We also implement a prototype using a private Ethereum network with proof of authority consensus and present the time taken for the entire exchange and the gas (ethereum currency) consumed per exchange by the contracts. Also we implemented the secure knowledge discovery to understand the significance of the developed scheme. The results show that the exchange can be implemented in an IIoT environment and work with a reasonable amount of resource consumption.