Privacy-Preserving IoT Data Aggregation Based on Blockchain and Homomorphic Encryption

• Main Authors: Faiza Loukil, Chirine Ghedira-Guegan, Khouloud Boukadi, Aïcha-Nabila Benharkat
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: privacy; Internet of Things; data aggregation; blockchain technology; homomorphic encryption technology
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/7/2452

Data analytics based on the produced data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is expected to improve the individuals’ quality of life. However, ensuring security and privacy in the IoT data aggregation process is a non-trivial task. Generally, the IoT data aggregation process is based on centralized servers. Yet, in the case of distributed approaches, it is difficult to coordinate several untrustworthy parties. Fortunately, the blockchain may provide decentralization while overcoming the trust problem. Consequently, blockchain-based IoT data aggregation may become a reasonable choice for the design of a privacy-preserving system. To this end, we propose PrivDA, a Privacy-preserving IoT Data Aggregation scheme based on the blockchain and homomorphic encryption technologies. In the proposed system, each data consumer can create a smart contract and publish both terms of service and requested IoT data. Thus, the smart contract puts together into one group potential data producers that can answer the consumer’s request and chooses one aggregator, the role of which is to compute the group requested result using homomorphic computations. Therefore, group-level aggregation obfuscates IoT data, which complicates sensitive information inference from a single IoT device. Finally, we deploy the proposal on a private Ethereum blockchain and give the performance evaluation.