Secure Data Transmission via Hybrid Lightweight Authentication Framework

Abstract

Cloud storage has undergone drastic improvements in recent years as it facilitates the storage of huge volumes of data. However, storing data in the cloud remains a complex task as it has to deal with security concerns. Blockchain is implemented to successfully avoid the security crises involved in the cloud storage network. Several approaches have been developed to secure data transmission within the cloud, but they have resulted in minimal throughput, failed in detecting threats, and consumed more time to transmit data. To address these complexities, a Hybrid Smart Contract-enabled Lightweight Authentication framework (HSC-LwA) is proposed to secure the transmission of data in a heterogeneous blockchain. The proposed HSC-LwA model works with hybrid concepts that include a consensus algorithm, Proof of Stake (PoS), and Proof of Work (PoW). This hybrid method incorporates a reward-based strategy to verify the transaction to add a block to the network. The primary task of this model is to safeguard the information within the cloud network and the data in a heterogeneous blockchain. The evaluation of the proposed HSC-LwA method obtained the values for Gas Transaction, Genuine user rate, Responsiveness, and Transaction Time is 286.87KB, 0.88, 6.73s, and 5.48s based on transaction analysis, whereas the model showed the improvement by obtaining the values for the above metrics as 330.12KB, 0.86, 6.32s, 5.55s with user analysis.