Internet of Things (IoT) technology is now widely used in energy, healthcare, services, transportation, and other fields. With the increase in industrial equipment (e.g., smart mobile terminals, sensors, and other embedded devices) in the Internet of Things and the advent of Industry 4.0, there has been an explosion of data generated that is characterized by a high volume but small size. How to manage and protect sensitive private data in data sharing has become an urgent issue for enterprises. Traditional data sharing and storage relies on trusted third-party platforms or distributed cloud storage, but these approaches run the risk of single-node failure, and third parties and cloud storage providers can be vulnerable to attacks that can lead to data theft. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain-based secure data transfer scheme for enterprises in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT). We store raw data in the IIoT in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) network after encryption and store the Keyword-index table we designed in Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, and enterprises share the data by querying the Keyword-index table. We use Fabric's channel mechanism combined with our designed Chaincode to achieve privacy protection and efficient data transmission while using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to ensure data integrity. Finally, we performed security analysis and experiments on the proposed scheme, and the results show that overall the data transfer performance in the IPFS network is generally better than the traditional network, In the case of transferring 5 MB file size data, the transmission speed and latency of IPFS are 19.23 mb/s and 0.26 s, respectively, and the IPFS network is almost 4 times faster than the TCP/IP network while taking only a quarter of the time, which is more advantageous when transferring small files, such as data in the IIOT. In addition, our scheme outperforms the blockchain systems mainly used today in terms of both throughput, latency, and system overhead. The average throughput of our solution can reach 110 tps (transactions are executed per second), and the minimum throughput in experimental tests can reach 101 tps.
Keywords: Chaincode; Hyperledger Fabric blockchain; IPFS; Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT); data security sharing; privacy-preserved.