Blockchain and Onion-Routing-Based Secure Message Exchange System for Edge-Enabled IIoT

Abstract

M2M communication in the Industrial Internet of Things is still in its infancy as the information exchange between machines is hindered by various modern security challenges and threats. An attacker can leverage the M2M communication by exploiting it with resource exhaustion, data integrity, and injection attacks. In this article, to address the aforementioned security issues, we first employed a long short-term memory based AI model on the edge servers to classify the machines' malicious and nonmalicious message requests and forwarded them to the onion routing (OR) network. Then, to enhance the security and reliability of the conventional OR network, we have associated it with blockchain technology by incorporating two additional fields along with the original message requests, i.e., verifying token and time to live that validates the incoming message requests. Additionally, the OR network, along with blockchain, is simulated inside a discrete simulator, i.e., a shadow simulator. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is evaluated with different performance metrics, such as F1 score, precision, recall, and false-negative rate. The empirical results show that the proposed OR network outperforms the conventional OR in terms of throughput, decryption time (computationally inexpensive), and OR circuit compromised rate.