Trustworthy Blockchain Gateways for Resource-Constrained Clients and IoT Devices

Debe, Mazin and Salah, Khaled and Jayaraman, Raja and Arshad, Junaid (2021) Trustworthy Blockchain Gateways for Resource-Constrained Clients and IoT Devices. IEEE ACCESS, 9. ISSN 2169-3536

Preview

Text Trustworthy_Blockchain_Gateways_for_Blockchain_clients__Salah_copy_.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (676kB)

Abstract

Constrained blockchain clients are unable to process and store the entire blockchain ledger and mine blocks on the blockchain. Such nodes rely on the view of blockchain provided by full nodes termed as gateways. However, gateway nodes can provide a distorted view of the blockchain, making lightweight clients vulnerable to eclipse attack. When under such an attack, a client cannot differentiate between a forked view of the blockchain and the legitimate blockchain ledger leading to fatal consequences and huge losses incurred. To mitigate such threats, we propose a data attestation solution which employs full nodes as validators to attest the responses reported by gateways of lightweight nodes. Leveraging smart contracts, our approach gives lightweight clients confidence in the data reported as they are unable to validate it from the blockchain network itself. The system governs the attestation process that comprises of submitting attestation requests, approving them, recording the response of validators, and manage payments. Clients can, thereafter, provide their feedback about the validator/gateway performance in the form of a reputation score. We present the proposed system architecture and describe its implementation on the Ethereum blockchain network. We evaluated the proposed solution with respect to functionality testing, cost of execution, and security analysis of smart contracts developed.We have also made our smart contracts code publicly available on Github.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3115150
Dates:	Date Event 22 September 2021 Accepted 23 September 2021 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Blockchains, Logic gates, Smart contracts, Peer-to-peer computing, Bitcoin, Testing, Security
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science
Divisions:	Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment > College of Computing
Depositing User:	Junaid Arshad
Date Deposited:	29 Sep 2021 15:08
Last Modified:	22 Mar 2023 12:00
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/12224

Actions (login required)

View Item