A verifiable and privacy-preserving cloud mining pool selection scheme in blockchain of things

Blockchain of Things (BCoT), as a new paradigm that incorporates blockchain with the Internet of Things (IoT), can address the privacy and extensibility issues in IoT systems and effectively enhance the data management of IoT devices. Asmost of theIoT devices are resource-constrained in terms of computing power, storage capacity, and energy con-sumption. Meanwhile,the enormous computational consumption in the consensus process of the blockchain makes it difficult to integrate with IoT closely and exert the great poten-tial of BCoT. latterly, the "cloud mining" mechanism has been proposed to address these issues, however,some potential problems still exist, such as data privacy and dishonest cloud mining pools, etc. In this paper, we propose a verifiable and privacy-preserving cloud mining pool selection scheme in BCoT (namely, VPP-CMPS). To obtain a better solution for cloud mining pool selection, we implement an improved time-locked puzzles technique to identify dishonest mining pools and perform the authenticity for mining pool selection. Afterwards,we obtain the privacy protection of the data during the entire selection process by adopting additively homomorphic ElGamal cryptosystem. Meanwhile, considering the resource-constrained case in IoT devices, we use a semi-honest cloud server to cooperate in dealing with the selection procedure, thereby reducing the computational overhead of IoT devices. Experimental results indicate that our scheme is more efficient and provides less computational cost.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc.