A blockchain-based security and trust mechanism for AI-enabled IIoT systems

The complexity and heterogeneity of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled industrial Internet of things (IIoT) lead to lacks of mutual trust between devices and directly affects the data security for the network. Therefore, it is necessary to provide trust mechanisms in AI-enabled IIoT. However, the existing trust mechanisms are not suitable in distributed networks. Thus, this paper presents a blockchain-based cloud-edge-end framework and designs a trust mechanism based on blockchain consensus. It utilizes the BLS-based proof of replication (PoRep) as consensus mechanisms and realizes device mutual trust. The device data is stored in servers to generate proofs and reach consensuses after broadcasting to other nodes. This ensures the data security of networks and provides mutual trust mechanisms between various devices. Moreover, the secret sharing based verifiable delay functions (VDF) is utilized to prevent the servers from calculating data replicas dynamically in PoRep and improve the efficiency of reaching consensus among nodes.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.