BlendSM-DDM: BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces

Abstract

To promote the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart communities and smart cities, a real-time data marketplace middleware platform, called the Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), has been recently proposed. While facilitating the easy exchanges of real-time IoT data streams between device owners and third-party applications through the marketplace, I3 is presently a monolithic, centralized platform for a single community. Although the service oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted in the IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture to provide scalable, inter-operable and extensible services for large numbers of distributed IoT devices and different application vendors. Traditional security solutions rely on a centralized authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or susceptible to a single point of failure. Inspired by containerized microservices and blockchain technology, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces (BlendSM-DDM). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data exchange and payment among participants in the marketplace. BlendSM-DDM is able to offer a decentralized, scalable and auditable data exchanges for the data marketplace.

BlendSPS: A BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Smart Public Safety System

“…The experimental results verified the feasibility of prototype design to provide a decentralized and fine-grained access control solution for public safety scenario. A similar design is also implemented by BlendSM-DDM [24] to provide a lightweight and decentralized security architecture in IoT-based data marketing systems.…”

“…To enabled decentralized security mechanism for distributed IoT-based applications, leveraging blockchain and smart contract has been a hot topic in academic and industrial communities. Some efforts have been reported recently, for example, smart surveillance system [2,23,27], social credit system [28,29], decentralized data marketing [24], space situation awareness [30], multidomain avionic system [31], biomedical imaging data processing [32], and access control strategy [33,34]. Given the aforementioned works, blockchain and smart contract are promising to enable a completely decentralized mechanism to secure data sharing and accessing for distributed IoT-based SPS systems.…”

Microchain: a Light Hierarchical Consensus Protocol for IoT System

“…The blockchain-based service provision usually utilizes special characteristics of blockchain networks, such as self-organization, decentralization, and security, to guarantee target features provided in their respective services. A decentralized data marketplace (DDM) could use blockchain and smart contract technologies to provide secured transactions and data integrity in a self-organized big data marketplace [37,57]. Another prospective application is distributed security service infrastructure to provides flexible and scalable data access control and privacy preservation for applications, like public social security and smart public safety system.…”

“…Recently, there are many reported efforts that aims at addressing security issues in IoT systems leveraging the blockchain and smart contract enabled mechanisms for IoT-based applications. For example, public safety system [56], smart surveillance system [30,33], social credit system [23,24,55], decentralized data market [57], space and avionics systems [6,53], biometric imaging data processing [50], identification authentication and access control [51,52]. All these reported researches have verified that blockchain and smart contract together are promising to provide a decentralized security mechanism to IoT systems.…”

Confidentiality and Integrity Mechanisms for Microservices Communication

“…[29] BlendSM-DDM: BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces. [30] Performance Analysis of RESTful API and RabbitMQ for Microservice Web Application. [31] A platform-independent communication framework for the simplified development of shop-floor applications as microservice components.…”