Galaxy: A Scalable BFT and Privacy-Preserving Pub/Sub IoT Data Sharing Framework Based on Blockchain

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in recent years has led to a considerable amount of data to be shared across different organizations. The publish and subscribe (Pub/Sub) paradigm, with its asynchronous, one-to-many and decoupling characteristics, is considered to be a promising communication model in IoT. However, designing a Pub/Sub framework for IoT data sharing confronts two challenges: Byzantine faults and privacy concerns. Byzantine nodes that are subjectively malicious or hacked by attackers may discard or forge data in the broker network composed of untrusted IoT organizations. Unauthorized brokers or clients may try to obtain the content of publications or subscriptions, thus violating the IoT data privacy. Existing works have limitations in terms of relatively low scalability and high overhead in tackling these two challenges. In this paper, we propose Galaxy, a blockchain based Pub/Sub IoT data sharing framework. To achieve Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) Pub/Sub, Galaxy adopts sharding to improve scalability and achieve efficient BFT Pub/Sub workflow within each shard with a novel leader rotation scheme. In attaining privacy-preserving Pub/Sub, a secret key sharing and encrypted Pub/Sub scheme is designed in Galaxy to achieve low overhead without breaking the decoupling of the system. We implemented a prototype of Galaxy and deployed it on Alibaba Cloud for experimental evaluation. The experiment results show the feasibility and efficiency of Galaxy.