Main-Secondary Blockchain Framework: Cross-Domain Trust Management Mechanism Using Trust Ticket

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can facilitate smart manufacturing and increase productivity through revolutionary techniques. As production processes are getting more sophisticated, an entire production process is usually completed collaboratively by multiple administrative domains (e.g., factories). Trust management is an effective solution to establish trust relationship between the devices from different administrative domains. Recently, many researchers integrate blockchain into trust management mechanisms. However, the existing methods have the shortcoming of low throughput, high delay and storage overhead, so cannot meet scalability requirements of large-scale IIoT multi-domains scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a main-secondary chain framework to realize a scalable cross-domain trust management mechanism (MSB-CTrust), where trust tickets are used to resolve the heterogeneity issue of trust evaluation methods in different domains. Besides, MSB-CTrust provides embedded salary distribution rules, which are used to encourage all devices to behave honestly based on a revenue strategy game. Performance evaluations in the experiments show the feasibility and effectiveness of MSB-CTrust.