Smart contract and IPFS-based trustworthy secure data storage and device authentication scheme in fog computing environment

The traditional Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) ecosystem utilizes the Trusted Third Party (TTP) to store sensitive data, and TTP acts as a middleware for device authentication. Therefore, maintaining data privacy is one of the main challenges and research issues due to third-party involvement. Moreover, several known challenges such as Single-Point-of-Failure (SPoF), trust issues, centralized systems, and security vulnerabilities exist in the IIoT ecosystem. Blockchain is one of the solutions to address above mentioned challenges. This article proposes a fully decentralized system (without TTP) based on the ethereum smart contracts and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for IIoT. Moreover, we propose a device authentication mechanism by utilizing smart contracts and storing the data in a distributed manner using IPFS. This work also provides data accessing policies for the end-users. The proposed contract is implemented in both JavaScript VM and ropsten test networks. It provides an in-depth analysis of the smart contract while simulating the contract in local and global environments. Moreover, the various costs involved in proposing the protocol are also calculated and compared to current studies. The informal investigation demonstrates that the solutions are secure and meet critical security criteria.