Title: Post-quantum blockchain for secure communication in IoT-based smart home services

Authors: Wai-Kong Lee; Lanxiang Chen; Chin-Chen Chang; Zhiqiang Yao

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, Gachon University, Seongnam, South Korea ' College of Mathematics and Informatics, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Security and Cryptology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China ' Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan ' College of Mathematics and Informatics, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Security and Cryptology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China

Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) technology is progressing by leaps and bounds in the past decade, which opens up many innovative applications that enhance our daily life. One of the notable examples is the introduction of IoT-based smart home services (SHS), which aims to provide ubiquitous sensing and intelligent control at home. Security is an important issue in SHS that needs to be resolved before it can receive wide adoption. In this paper, we propose BC-SHS, a consortium blockchain to protect the IoT-based SHS. The SHS within a community forms a consortium blockchain, while the cloud service provider (CSP) joins the consortium blockchain to provide services through smart contracts. External communication (between smart homes and cloud servers) goes through this consortium blockchain, which ensures integrity, authenticity, auditability and privacy preservation of SHSs. In addition to this, we analyse state of the art post-quantum signature schemes and propose to adopt pqNTRUsign as a replacement to the existing ECDSA signature scheme. This can help to protect the proposed BC-SHS from potential quantum computer attack in future. We provide analysis on the proposed BC-SHS in terms of security, deployment cost and communication overhead.

Keywords: internet of things; IoT; blockchain; smart home; post-quantum cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2021.120260

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2021 Vol.14 No.5, pp.509 - 524

Received: 02 Jul 2020
Accepted: 08 Sep 2020

Published online: 13 Jan 2022 *

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