SEA: Secure and Efficient Public Auditing for Edge-Assisted IoT Aggregated Data Sharing

With the increasing deployment of sensors and the consequent rise in IoT data, it is prudent for system administrators to adopt data aggregation strategies in edge-assisted IoT scenarios. This approach enables the collection and sharing of data, while mitigating the strain on bandwidth resources caused by traditional direct-communication methods. Sharing these data can create extra value, where the precondition is to ensure data integrity. However, due to the different signature keys, the aggregated data cannot directly verify the aggregated signatures from different devices in batches. This paper proposes a blockchain-based efficient and secure public auditing scheme for aggregated data sharing in the edge-assisted IoT paradigm. For security, we propose a proxy re-signature based data auditing protocol to transfer aggregated data signatures to auditing metadata. Considering the possible error data injection attack, we attach an authentication protocol to the auditing scheme. For efficiency, we propose a hash index balanced tree (HIBT) to reduce the computational expense of signature retrieval. And we design an authentication proof transfer mechanism to realize efficient re-authentication. Finally, we propose a secure and efficient auditing framework (SEA) by connecting all processes and combining the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm and blockchain. Also, security and performance analyses prove the proposal has advantages compared with existing schemes.