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Open AccessArticle
Achieving Accountability and Data Integrity in Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System
by
Sara Lazzaro
Sara Lazzaro
and
Francesco Buccafurri
Francesco Buccafurri
Francesco Buccafurri is a full professor of computer science at the University Mediterranea of In he [...]
Francesco Buccafurri is a full professor of computer science at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy. In 1995, he received a PhD degree in computer science at the University of Calabria. In 1996, he was a visiting researcher at the database and knowledge representation group of Vienna University of Technology. His research interests include cybersecurity and privacy, social networks,
deductive databases, knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning, model checking, data compression, data streams, agents, and P2P systems. He has published over 200 papers in top-level international journals and conference proceedings. He serves as a referee for international journals, and he is a member of a number of conference PCs. Francesco Buccafurri is the Associate Editor of Information Sciences (Elsevier) and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, he is included in the editorial board of a number of other international journals and plays the role of PC chair and PC member in many international conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE computer society.
*
Department DIIES, University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Via Università 25, 89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Future Internet 2024, 16(7), 246; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi16070246 (registering DOI)
Submission received: 16 June 2024
/
Revised: 9 July 2024
/
Accepted: 11 July 2024
/
Published: 13 July 2024
Abstract
Ensuring accountability and integrity in MQTT communications is important for enabling several IoT applications. This paper presents a novel approach that combines blockchain technology and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to achieve non-repudiation and data integrity in the MQTT protocol. Our solution operates in discrete temporal rounds, during which the broker constructs a Merkle hash tree (MHT) from the messages received. Then the broker publishes the root on the blockchain and the MHT itself on IPFS. This mechanism guarantees that both publishers and subscribers can verify the integrity of the message exchanged. Furthermore, the interactions with the blockchain made by the publishers and the broker ensure they cannot deny having sent the exchanged messages. We provide a detailed security analysis, showing that under standard assumptions, the proposed solution achieves both data integrity and accountability. Additionally, we provided an experimental campaign to study the scalability and the throughput of the system. Our results show that our solution scales well with the number of clients. Furthermore, from our results, it emerges that the throughput reduction depends on the integrity check operations. However, since the frequency of these checks can be freely chosen, we can set it so that the throughput reduction is negligible. Finally, we provided a detailed analysis of the costs of our solution showing that, overall, the execution costs are relatively low, especially given the critical security and accountability benefits it guarantees. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the higher the number of subscribers in the system, the lower the costs per client in our solution. Again, this confirms that our solution does not present any scalability issues.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Lazzaro, S.; Buccafurri, F.
Achieving Accountability and Data Integrity in Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System. Future Internet 2024, 16, 246.
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi16070246
AMA Style
Lazzaro S, Buccafurri F.
Achieving Accountability and Data Integrity in Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System. Future Internet. 2024; 16(7):246.
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi16070246
Chicago/Turabian Style
Lazzaro, Sara, and Francesco Buccafurri.
2024. "Achieving Accountability and Data Integrity in Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System" Future Internet 16, no. 7: 246.
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi16070246
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