An End-to-End Secure Communication Framework for Smart Homes Environment Using Consortium Blockchain System

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is widely employed in several fields, such as smart cities, intelligent transportation systems, smart power grids, smart homes, and digital healthcare solutions, to enhance the quality of life, promote sustainability, and foster social interactions. The significant challenges related to IoT encompass the legitimacy verification of intelligent devices, handling cryptographic keys for edge devices with limited resources, guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted IoT data, and securely storing that data in the cloud system. The Blockchain system, characterized by its distributed, decentralized, and irreversible ledger, has gained recognition for its efficacy in ensuring security for sensitive smart home applications. This paper presents a comprehensive security solution for smart homes, comprising smart sensor authentication, key management, data confidentiality, data integrity, secure storage, and access control for cloud-based data. A robust and secure end-to-end structure for smart homes is developed in two phases. During the initial stage, a private Blockchain system is established on the fog nodes to facilitate the authentication and access control mechanisms for smart home edge devices. This private Blockchain can distribute and manage keys, enabling it to securely transfer data from intelligent sensors to the cloud environment using fog nodes. A consortium Blockchain is established during the next phase to simulate the cloud service providers. This Blockchain enables the provision of secured storage and data access control within the cloud, enhancing secure cloud storage even in a hostile environment. The novel contribution of this article relies on the integration of private and consortium Blockchain networks with a streamlined collaboration. This amalgamation achieves the efficient and distributed control of multiple Blockchain validators. A secure prototype has been developed to visualize and engage with a smart home environment. This prototype effectively displays data using various graphical and interactive techniques. The performance metrics, including attack resilience, latency and throughput of the network proves the efficiency of proposed framework as compared to state-of-the-art works. In future, we focus on the cross-chain interactions in multi-Blockchain environments and address the existing limitations such as inconsistencies, interoperability issues, and inefficient security measures.