Lwin May Thura, Yim Jinhyuk, Ko Young-Bae
Department of Computer Engineering, Ajou University, Suwon 16499, Korea.
Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute, Daejeon 34129, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2020 Jan 27;20(3):698. doi: 10.3390/s20030698.
As a trending and interesting research topic, in recent years, researchers have been adopting the blockchain in the wireless ad-hoc environment. Owing to its strong characteristics, such as consensus, immutability, finality, and provenance, the blockchain is utilized not only as a secure data storage for critical data but also as a platform that facilitates the trustless exchange of data between independent parties. However, the main challenge of blockchain application in an ad-hoc network is which kind of nodes should be involved in the validation process and how to adopt the heavy computational complexity of block validation appropriately while maintaining the genuine characteristics of a blockchain. In this paper, we propose the blockchain-based trust management system with a lightweight consensus algorithm in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The proposed scheme provides the distributed trust framework for routing nodes in MANETs that is tamper-proof via blockchain. The optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) is exploited as a representative protocol to embed the blockchain concept in MANETs. As a securely distributed and trusted platform, blockchain solves most of the security issues in the OLSR, in which every node is performing the security operation individually and in a repetitive manner. Additionally, using predefined principles, the routing nodes in the proposed scheme can collaborate to defend themselves from the attackers in the network. The experimental results show that the proposed consensus algorithm is suitable to be used in the resource-hungry MANET with reduced validation time and less overhead. Meanwhile, the attack detection overhead and time also decrease because the repetitivity of the process is reduced while providing a scalable and distributed trust among the routing nodes.
作为一个热门且有趣的研究课题，近年来，研究人员一直在无线自组织环境中采用区块链。由于其具有诸如共识性、不可变性、终结性和可溯源性等强大特性，区块链不仅被用作关键数据的安全存储，还被用作促进独立各方之间进行无需信任的数据交换的平台。然而，区块链在自组织网络中应用的主要挑战在于，验证过程应涉及哪种类型的节点，以及如何在保持区块链真正特性的同时，适当采用块验证的高计算复杂度。在本文中，我们提出了一种在移动自组织网络（MANET）中具有轻量级共识算法的基于区块链的信任管理系统。所提出的方案为MANET中的路由节点提供了一个通过区块链实现防篡改的分布式信任框架。优化的链路状态路由协议（OLSR）被用作将区块链概念嵌入MANET的代表性协议。作为一个安全分布式且可信的平台，区块链解决了OLSR中的大多数安全问题，在OLSR中每个节点都单独且重复地执行安全操作。此外，利用预定义的原则，所提出方案中的路由节点可以协作抵御网络中的攻击者。实验结果表明，所提出的共识算法适用于资源匮乏的MANET，具有减少的验证时间和更低的开销。同时，攻击检测开销和时间也会减少，因为在减少过程重复性的同时，在路由节点之间提供了可扩展且分布式的信任。
