A blockchain-based dynamic and traceable data integrity verification scheme for smart homes

A smart home system composed of numerous smart devices has benefited people’s life due to the feature of convenience. With the development of smart home technology, huge amounts of data stored on external servers flow between different smart devices, and the integrity of these data is of great importance to the security of smart home systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based data integrity verification scheme that supports efficient dynamic operations for a smart home system. In the verification scheme, we utilize the home gateway (HG) to aggregate all the data information and design a data structure that can be efficiently and dynamically operated to store the tag information of the data, which can reduce the local storage pressure in smart home systems. Moreover, homomorphic verifiable tags are used to formulate verification strategies and record the interactions between HG, cloud service providers (CSP), and third-party auditor (TPA) on the blockchain to make the verification service traceable and useful. Then, the theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the scheme is effective and cost-acceptable in smart home systems.