Blockchain-empowered cloud architecture based on secret sharing for smart city
Introduction
Nowadays, IT (Information Technology)’s evolution is not just an explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices that connect things with things but also digitalize them in real life, such as the smart city. This change has gone beyond a small individual space, such as smart homes, and the concept of smart cities has emerged, integrating the city itself with innovative technologies. Smart City means a state-of-the-art city whose IT and urban resources collect efficient and intelligent innovations beyond simply providing convenience [1]. Smart City has recently received much attention, along with the rapid development of IT industry technology in modern society and the phenomenon of urban population concentration [2]. Large-scale smart city application services connected to the IoT are developing applications including smart health care, smart transportation, and smart manufacturing, giving rise to population centralization problems even as user convenience is enhanced [3,4]. IoT devices are rapidly increasing according to user convenience. Thus, it shows that all things have been digitalized and connected, and new services derived from them are explored. After all, smart cities are fully connected to different heterogeneous systems. Some problems, such as efficient and effective data management and security, still exist as large amounts of data occur in real-time. Nevertheless, spending on IoT devices is expected to exceed $1 trillion in 2022 [5], and urban population concentration is forecast to increase to 66% by 2050 [6].
Cloud services can often be a solution to address the problems above, as heterogeneous systems in smart cities or environments where large amounts of data occur are increasingly complex and challenging for users to manage information [7], [8]. For the challenges of massive data environments and management, IoT users primarily utilize external public clouds. Users can use outsourcing storage to take advantage of various data as IoT devices increase including real-time, large-scale data outside the domain [9]. Therefore, users can be forced to use cloud storage to efficiently manage data in smart cities, an environment where large amounts of IoT-based data are generated. Still, data on IoT devices generated by individual users in smart city environments may contain personal information that should not be disclosed to the public. For example, smart home IP CCTV data exposure can give rise to serious security issues and privacy breaches. Therefore, entrusting the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with data containing personal information is a security challenge that must be addressed [10], [11], [12], [13].
CSP can store copies to manage the individual data that customers store. Even if the customer requires it to delete the data, there are no adequate means of verifying the original data's deletion and copies of the data [14]. To solve these problems, data can be encrypted before being sent to cloud storage. Nonetheless, encryption is likely to become vulnerable over time. In other words, if the CSP keeps the data without deleting it, there is always offline brute force-like aggression for encrypted information. Not only CSP can destroy some of the data that has not been accessed for a long time to manage the organization's resources [15] efficiently, and there is a need to maintain the integrity that information is always protected without tampering. Therefore, it is safe to use distributed systems instead of storing all the data for a particular CSP. After all, external cloud storage services should be applied to users' convenience in an evolving smart city environment. Still, they must address privacy issues and security concerns in protecting the integrity of the data. In this paper, blockchain technology is applied to protect data integrity, with a secret sharing algorithm used to protect user data privacy. The secret sharing algorithm was proposed in 1979 by Blakley [16] and Shamir [17] as a solution to secure the secret encryption key. An algorithm that protects the original data by dividing it into several secret pieces. This algorithm can reconstruct the original data only if it has been collected above the threshold at which the distributed secret piece was designed. Therefore, these secret sharing algorithms can be used as a solution to solve privacy problems.
Blockchain is a distributed computing ledger management technology that can structure data into blocks, which are small sets of data connected in chain form to manage data safely based on the P2P method [18], [19], [20]. The blockchain prevents data from tampering with the data block connected like a chain. These blockchain technologies are applied in various service applications because they protect data integrity and enable secure P2P communication without the need for a third party to trust a centralized system. The secret sharing concept is used at the internetwork layer for security and privacy during encryption and decryption of data with communication for fog layer. In this paper, we analyze the security problems that may arise from external public cloud services and present solutions to the requirements for designing a secure cloud architecture.
The contributions of this study are summarized as follows:
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We identify problems and requirements that may arise during external public cloud storage for safe and efficient data management in smart city environments and extensive, heterogeneous networks based on IoT.
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The proposed Blockchain-Empowered Cloud Architecture based on Secret Sharing contributes to personal information protection and improved data integrity and security using blockchain technology and efficient secret sharing algorithms for smart city environments.
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We compare and analyze existing systems with the proposed models based on secure, efficient cloud architecture requirements.
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To test the proposed architecture, conduct an experimental analysis by building a blockchain with the CSPs in use. The proposed architecture demonstrates fast transaction speeds compared to existing studies in a limited test environment.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Related research studies are described in Section 2; Section 3 describes in detail the Blockchain-Empowered Cloud Architecture based on Secret Sharing from a methodological perspective; Section 4 compares and analyzes the proposed architecture with existing studies; Section 5 presents the conclusion.
Section snippets
Related works
This section analyzes the concepts and existing studies of blockchain and Secret Sharing, the core technologies applied in the proposed approach. The requirements for the design principles of cloud architecture for smart city environments are derived through the analysis. Finally, the relevant studies conducted are analyzed to address their needs.
Proposed architecture
This chapter proposes cloud architecture to prevent possible privacy problems in cloud storage to manage safely and effectively large amounts of data generated by IoT devices in large heterogeneous environments. Using outsourced cloud storage in a large heterogeneous smart city network will force data users to rely on CSP for data access. The CSP can read user information by permanently storing a copy of the user's data. Solutions can be applied to prevent privacy infringement by encrypting
Experiment and analysis
This section analyzes the cloud architecture proposed in this paper and describes the feasibility of the contribution. The analysis is based on the requirements. Finally, we discuss the proposed approach from a security perspective.
Conclusions
In this paper, we analyzed the user-side requirements that may occur in a smart city environment and studied the limitations to solve them. The Blockchain-Empowered Cloud Architecture based on Secret Sharing proposed in this paper can solve privacy problems because it distributes and stores data to CSPs in several blockchain networks rather than independent CSPs. In addition, the proposed secret dispersion algorithm can recover the original data even if a particular CSP modulates or loses the
Author contributions
Conceptualization Jeonghun Cha; Investigation, Jeonghun Cha and Tae Woo Kim; Writing—review & editing, Jeonghun Cha and Jong Hyuk Park; Writing—original draft, Jeonghun Cha and Sushil Kumar Singh; Methodology, Jeonghun Cha; Validation, Jeonghun Cha and Sushil Kumar Singh; Resources, Jeonghun Cha; Visualization, Jeonghun Cha and Sushil Kumar Singh; Formal analysis, Jeonghun Cha and Sushil Kumar Singh; Supervision, Yi Pan and Jong Hyuk Park; Project administration, Jeonghun Cha; Funding
Copyright
© 2020 by the authors. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
Funding
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (NRF-2019R1A2B5B01070416).
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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