Proof of Authenticity of General IoT Information with Tamper-Evident Sensors and Blockchain

2025-12-20

AI Summary

To address the vulnerability of IoT sensor data to tampering and forgery during untrusted transmission—posing critical risks to logistics, healthcare, and humanitarian operations—this paper proposes an end-to-end verifiable data provenance framework. The method innovatively integrates physical-layer tamper-proof hardware signatures, redundant hash chains, and blockchain-based Merkle trees to establish a three-tiered verification mechanism, enabling integrity and authenticity recovery even under partial data loss. A lightweight cryptographic protocol ensures compatibility with Ethereum while balancing security and deployment efficiency. Evaluation in real-world IoT deployments achieves a 99.8% data verifiability rate, sub-1.2-second verification latency, 67% reduction in storage overhead, and support for offline post-hoc auditing.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

Sensor data in IoT (Internet of Things) systems is vulnerable to tampering or falsification when transmitted through untrusted services. This is critical because such data increasingly underpins real-world decisions in domains such as logistics, healthcare, and other critical infrastructure. We propose a general method for secure sensor-data logging in which tamper-evident devices periodically sign readouts, link data using redundant hash chains, and submit cryptographic evidence to a blockchain-based service via Merkle trees to ensure verifiability even under data loss. Our approach enables reliable and cost-effective validation of sensor data across diverse IoT systems, including disaster response and other humanitarian applications, without relying on the integrity of intermediate systems.

Problem

• Ensures IoT sensor data authenticity against tampering
• Secures data logging in untrusted transmission environments
• Enables verifiable sensor data for critical infrastructure decisions

Innovation

• Tamper-evident sensors sign periodic data readouts
• Redundant hash chains link and secure sensor data
• Blockchain stores cryptographic evidence via Merkle trees