A Trust-Evaluation-Enhanced Blockchain-Secured Industrial IoT System

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), allowing direct wireless communications between industrial machines and people, is the key component of Industry 4.0. By grouping several IIoT devices (IIoT-Ds) into IIoT groups (IIoT-Gs), the IIoT-Ds within one group can share information and deter malicious users from accessing the network by modifying the access control list (ACL) in IIoT-Ds. In an IIoT-G, several IIoT-Ds jointly manage the access control of IIoT sensors. The security of ACL is protected by blockchains deployed in IIoT-Ds. Even secured by blockchains, a blockchain-based IIoT-G (B-IIoT-G) still cannot secure correct access control in a system with more than half of the blockchain-based IIoT-Ds (B-IIoT-Ds) from spreading wrong authorization information. In this article, we propose a B-IIoT-G with trust evaluation for each B-IIoT-D to evaluate the weight in voting for final decisions of authorization. By designing a new voting mechanism with trust evaluation for the access control in B-IIoT-G, the system has a higher probability of making correct authorization even with malicious B-IIoT-Ds. Simulation results have demonstrated that the mechanism with trust evaluation can still make, with a high probability, correct authorization even with more than half of the B-IIoT-Ds in B-IIoT-G being malicious.