Towards secure industrial IoT: blockchain system with credit-based consensus mechanism
Open accessAbstract
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an indispensable role for Industry 4.0, where people are committed to implement a general, scalable, and secure IIoT system to be adopted across various industries. However, existing IIoT systems are vulnerable to single point of failure and malicious attacks, which cannot provide stable services. Due to the resilience and security promise of blockchain, the idea of combining blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) gains considerable interest. However, blockchains are power-intensive and low-throughput, which are not suitable for power-constrained IoT devices. To tackle these challenges, we present a blockchain system with credit-based consensus mechanism for IIoT. We propose a credit-based proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism for IoT devices, which can guarantee system security and transaction efficiency simultaneously. In order to protect sensitive data confidentiality, we design a data authority management method to regulate the access to sensor data. In addition, our system is built based on directed acyclic graph -structured blockchains, which is more efficient than the Satoshi-style blockchain in performance. We implement the system on Raspberry Pi, and conduct a case study for the smart factory. Extensive evaluation and analysis results demonstrate that credit-based PoW mechanism and data access control are secure and efficient in IIoT.
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In a Sybil attack, the malicious nodes create several identities to either flood the network with transactions or make false statements, such as fake traffic congestion.
“In a Sybil attack, the malicious nodes create several identities to either flood the network with transactions or make false statements, such as fake traffic congestion [7,10].”
From A survey on the adoption of blockchain in IoT: challenges and solutions (2021) · cites this paper as [10]
Most existing IoT architectures maintain a centralized data centre for storing and processing sensor data, which is at risk of security breaches, single-point failure, and malicious attacks such as DDoS and Sybil attacks.
“Most existing IoT architecture maintains a centralized data centre for storing and processing sensors' data, which can be at risk of breaching security, single-point failure and malicious attacks like DDoS, Sybil attack [8,10,273].”
From A survey on the adoption of blockchain in IoT: challenges and solutions (2021) · cites this paper as [10]
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“The reliance on blockchain consensus — even optimized “credit - based” Proof -of-Work — introduces probabilistic latency that fundamentally violates the deterministic requirements of the OT environment [3][5][11][17].”
- Authors
- Huang, J., Kong, L., Chen, G., Wu, M.-Y., Liu, X., & Zeng, P.
- Affiliations
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
- McGill University (CA)
- Shenyang Institute of Automation (CN)
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
- Published
- 2019-06
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 3680-3689
- ISSN
- 1551-3203 (ISSN-L)
- 1941-0050
- OpenAlex
- W2921608598
- Cited by
- 563
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 21 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 59 · 2023: 119 · 2022: 103 · 2021: 114 · 2020: 71 · 2019: 26
- FWCI
- 97.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- ir.sia.cn
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (publishedVersion)
- SIA OpenIR (Chinese Academy of Sciences) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFB1004703)
- China NSF (61672349, 61672353, 61373155)
- 2017 CCF-IFAA (Z50201800178)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
- Keywords
- Industrial Internet of Things, blockchain, proof-of-work, directed acyclic graphs, data access control, Internet of Things security, smart factory, transaction efficiency
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