Securing IoT Data: FDUP-RDICA Fully Decentralized Approach for Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Data Integrity

By the limitations of storage capacity and computing power, Internet of Things (IoT) devices may prefer to outsource their valuable and sensitive data to cloud storage providers (CSPs) for further analysis, so it is critical to design protocols that can verify the integrity of these data remotely, while preserving the privacy of their owners. This article proposes a novel remote data integrity checking method for IoT, namely, FDUP-remote data integrity checking (RDIC), which achieves fully decentralized, efficient, and unconditionally privacy-preserving checking simultaneously, that is, the proof-checking is performed efficiently on the blockchain by the smart contracts integrated with native C/C++ codes, while the blockchain or any other entity cannot learn any information about the data content, even they have unbounded computing power. Furthermore, it is optimized for low-power IoT devices by greatly reducing the exponentiations of generating homomorphic verifiable tags to be nearly independent of the block size of the outsourced data. To defend against untrusted IoT and CSP, we present strict proofs and analyses in the aspect of correctness, soundness, and unconditionally privacy-preserving. The evaluation of theoretical performance and the prototype system deployed on a blockchain platform indicate that FDUP-RDIC is suitable for real-world IoT applications.