DEXO: A Secure and Fair Exchange Mechanism for Decentralized IoT Data Markets

TL;DR

DEXO introduces a decentralized, secure, and fair data exchange mechanism for IoT data markets, ensuring data authenticity, confidentiality, and fairness with strong resilience against collusion, leveraging hardware-cryptographic co-design and blockchain technology.

Contribution

It presents the first integrated hardware-cryptographic framework for secure, fair, and verifiable IoT data exchange in decentralized markets.

Findings

Prototype implementation demonstrates feasibility.

Moderate deployment cost.

Improved blockchain operation efficiency.

Abstract

Opening up data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices for public utilization can maximize their economic value. Challenges remain in the trustworthiness of the data sources and the security of the trading process, particularly when there is no trust between the data providers and consumers. In this paper, we propose DEXO, a decentralized data exchange mechanism that facilitates secure and fair data exchange between data consumers and distributed IoT/mobile data providers at scale, allowing the consumer to verify the data generation process and the providers to be compensated for providing authentic data, with correctness guarantees from the exchange platform. To realize this, DEXO extends the decentralized oracle network model that has been successful in the blockchain applications domain to incorporate novel hardware-cryptographic co-design that harmonizes trusted execution environment, secret sharing, and smart contract-assisted fair exchange. For the first time, DEXO ensures end-to-end data confidentiality, source verifiability, and fairness of the exchange process with strong resilience against participant collusion. We implemented a prototype of the DEXO system to demonstrate feasibility. The evaluation shows a moderate deployment cost and significantly improved blockchain operation efficiency compared to a popular data exchange mechanism.