BlockEdge: A Privacy-Aware Secured Edge Computing Framework Using Blockchain for Industry 4.0

Edge computing has its application in a lot of areas now, but with the increasing popularity and benefits, it suffers from some challenges such as data privacy and security. Intruder attacks should be prevented and only authentic users should have access to data storage. Most of the authentication techniques apply some trusted entity to undergo the process. Users and servers both have to be registered in the trusted entity to get permission of authenticating other users. In this scenario, the entire system depends on a single trusted entity; so, a single point of failure can cause the failure of the total system, and scalability issues are there also. To address these issues remaining in the existing systems, in this paper, a decentralized approach has been discussed which is capable of eliminating the concept of a single trusted entity by introducing a blockchain paradigm in edge computing where every time a user or server wants to enter the system, it does not have to register itself manually, but the authentication process is carried out throughout the scheme automatically. Experimental results and performance analysis prove that the proposed architecture is definitely beneficial and it outperforms the existing ones in the concerned domain.