Blockchain-Assisted Efficient Data Sharing Scheme With Accountability and Privacy-Preserving for Internet of Drones Networks

Internet of Drones (IoD) has become crucial due to the surge of drone-based applications. In a dynamic wireless network, drones often share data with multiple users, which is vulnerable to various security threats, e.g., eavesdropping, privacy leakage, and impersonation. Ensuring secure sharing of drone operation data is a critical issue. Existing schemes employ blockchain to ensure accountability in untrusted IoD contexts. However, drones perform excessive operations, e.g., consensus and homomorphic encryption, leading to impractical drone computation overhead. Furthermore, these existing schemes perform point-to-multipoint (P2MP) data sharing by using identity-based broadcast encryption (IBBE) as it has stateless receiver property, i.e., drones can directly establish sharing groups based on the receiver identities. However, these IBBE-based schemes need to preset the sharing group capacity, reducing sharing efficiency and flexibility in dynamic IoD networks. Also, identities in sharing groups probably result in receiver privacy breaches. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-assisted data-sharing scheme with accountability and privacy-preserving for IoD networks. We utilize on-chain immutable smart contracts and short signatures to construct a lightweight accountability mechanism that can verify and punish the above misbehavior. We develop an efficient privacy-preserving IBBE algorithm for P2MP sharing of drone operation data that enables dynamic group sharing. We prove that our algorithm is secure and receiver anonymity against chosen ciphertext attacks. The experiment results show that our scheme outperforms existing schemes in computational and communication overhead. In real-world logistics scenarios, the wireless data rate of 50Mbps can satisfy the communication requirements for ciphertext lengths up to 19.5KB. For a sharing group of 60 receivers, drone encryption costs only about 101 ms. The decryption cost remains constant and takes about 3.1 ms.