Post-quantum blockchain for secure communication in IoT-based smart home services

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) technology is progressing by leaps and bounds in the past decade, which opens up many innovative applications that enhance our daily life. One of the notable examples is the introduction of IoT-based smart home services (SHS), which aims to provide ubiquitous sensing and intelligent control at home. Security is an important issue in SHS that needs to be resolved before it can receive wide adoption. In this paper, we propose BC-SHS, a consortium blockchain to protect the IoT-based SHS. The SHS within a community forms a consortium blockchain, while the cloud service provider (CSP) joins the consortium blockchain to provide services through smart contracts. External communication (between smart homes and cloud servers) goes through this consortium blockchain, which ensures integrity, authenticity, auditability and privacy preservation of SHSs. In addition to this, we analyse state of the art post-quantum signature schemes and propose to adopt pqNTRUsign as a replacement to the existing ECDSA signature scheme. This can help to protect the proposed BC-SHS from potential quantum computer attack in future. We provide analysis on the proposed BC-SHS in terms of security, deployment cost and communication overhead.