A Novel Consensus Mechanism using Impression based Byzantine Fault-Tolerance for Lightweight Blockchain in IoT enabled Smart Home Autonomous System
Mohammad Sahil, Praveen Kumar Yadav, Mahesh Kumar Dash, Md Shahil, Ram Chandra Barik · 2024
The escalation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices accentuates the criticality of cybersecurity, given their capacity to amass confidential multimedia data including audio, imagery, and biometrics. The centralized architecture traditionally supporting IoT introduces a monolithic control over data, elevating risks of data breaches and tampering which may lead to a single point of failure that is vulnerable to attacks. Blockchain technology emerges as a transformative solution by decentralizing data validation, negating the need for a centralized authority, and thus mitigating single-point vulnerability. Classical blockchain frameworks are ill-suited for IoT, primarily due to their public data exposure with the excessive requirements for storage and processing power driven by the continuous growth of the blocks and the intensity of consensus protocols. Addressing these incongruities, this paper suggests a decentralized framework through a lightweight blockchain considering a new Impression based Byzantine Fault-Tolerance (IBFT) consensus mechanism. IBFT minimizes computational demands by utilizing an ‘impression value’ to elect the network’s primary node, significantly enhancing performance. Additionally, integration with the Storj platform, a decentralized storage system is also proposed to ensure robust data encryption with distribution to mitigate vulnerability issues in centralized storage focusing the challenges pertaining to blockchain storage. The proposed next generation blockchain framework outperforms among recent state-of-art algorithms against emerging threats to secure IoT ecosystems.