A Lightweight Approach (BL-DAC) to Secure Storage Sharing in Cloud-IoT Environments.

The growing advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) users is driving the adoption of cloud computing technologies. The integration of IoT in the cloud enables storage and computational capabilities for IoT users. However, security has been one of the main concerns of cloud-integrated IoT. Existing work attempts to address the security concerns of cloud-integrated IoT through authentication, access control, and blockchain-based methods. However, existing frameworks are somewhat limited by scalability, privacy, and centralized structures. To mitigate the existing problems, we propose a blockchain-based distributed access control method for secure storage in the IoT cloud (BL-DAC). Initially, the BL-DAC performs decentralized authentication using the Quantum Neural Network Cryptography (QNNC) algorithm. IoT users and edge nodes are authenticated in the blockchain deployed by distributed Trusted Authorities (TAs) using multiple credentials. The user data is classified into sensitive and non-sensitive categories using the Enhanced Seagull Optimization (ESO) algorithm. Also, the authentication to access this data is performed by a decentralized access control method using smart contract policy. Sensitive user data is encrypted using the QNNC algorithm and stored in the private cloud. In contrast, non-sensitive data is stored in the public cloud, and IPFS is used to store data in a decentralized manner with high reliability. In addition, data security is improved by using a hierarchical blockchain which improves scalability by managing the multiple blockchains hierarchically and is lightweight using Proof of Authentication Consensus (PoAH). The BL-DAC is simulated and validated using the Network Simulator-3.26 simulation tool and validated. This work shows better results than the compared ones in terms of validation metrics such as throughput (26%), encryption time (19%), decryption time (16%), response time (15%), block validation time (31%), attack detection rate (16%), access control precision (13%), and scalability (28%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]