A Blockchain-Based Scheme for Secure Data Provenance in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), provenance is vital for assessing data's trustworthiness, detecting the misbehaviors conducted by adversaries or troubleshooting communication failures. The provenance can be encoded through fingerprinting the node IDs along a packet path where the packets are generated, forwarded and/or aggregated. Because WSNs are resource-tightened networks, most of the known provenance schemes applied in WSNs address the issues on how to reduce the provenance size with various compression techniques only. However, reducing the provenance size at a sensor node also costs too much energy. In addition, such schemes did not take the secure and persistant provenance storage for consideration in a long term. To fill the gap, we propose a blockchain-based data provenance scheme (BCP) of compression free, where the provenances are stored distributively on the nodes along the packet path and the BS can retrieve the provenance on demand through a query process. An edge computing based monitor network consisting of high performance nodes (H-nodes) is deployed above or nearby the WSNs, which keeps the WSN's provenance data in a blockchain-based database. The security and authenticity of the provenances are then protected. What's more, the WSN is released from consuming much energy in handling provenance data, which is more superior to all the previous schemes. Both the simulation and experiment results show that our scheme BCP is more energy efficient and secure than those of the known distributed data provenances.