BlockTrack-L: A lightweight blockchain-based provenance message tracking in IoT

Abstract

Data tracking is of great significance and a central part in digital forensics. In today's complex network design, Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate with each other and require strong security mechanisms. In maintaining an audit trail of IoT devices or provenance of IoT device data, it is important to know the origins of requests to ensure certain level of trust in IoT data. Blockchain can provide traceability of records generated from IoT devices in a sensitive environment. In this paper, we present an application layer data provenance model that works on execute-order architecture for cloud based IoT networks. It supports high throughput of transactions on the blockchain network with lightweight security overhead by using outsourced encryption on edge nodes. All communications among the IoT devices are connected to a blockchain network and stored on permissioned blockchain peers. The proposed system is evaluated to have less cryptographic load by offloading the IoT nodes with Edge nodes.