Multiple cloud storage mechanism based on blockchain in smart homes

The emergence of the smart home has fundamentally changed the quality of human living owing to its usefulness and convenience. However, it still has some serious problems that mainly lie in its relational database security. The data storage of a smart home cannot meet the security requirements of its residents. To strengthen its security, blockchain technology is applied to the data storage and data connection, being embodied in the data storage model in smart homes based on blockchains under multiple cloud providers. However, the model still has weaknesses due to its limited blockchain transaction storage space and the current speed of addressing blockchain storage transactions. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an identity-based proxy aggregate signature (IBPAS) scheme to improve the efficiency of signature verification, as well as compress the storage space and reduce the communication bandwidth. According to our experiments, although the communication cost of our IBPAS scheme accounts for only 12% to 39% of that of an ordinary signature scheme, its storage performance in a blockchain is better than that of the blockchain itself by 20%. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.