Data Confidentiality In P2P Communication And Smart Contracts Of Blockchain In Industry 4.0
This addresses privacy and security issues for companies in Industry 4.0, but it appears incremental as it builds on previous blockchain privacy methods.
The paper tackles the problem of secret data leakage in automatic data exchange within Industry 4.0 manufacturing by proposing a blockchain-based approach that ensures data confidentiality in P2P communication and smart contracts without centralized storage, while providing auditable proof of data exchange.
Increased collaborative production and dynamic selection of production partners within industry 4.0 manufacturing leads to ever-increasing automatic data exchange between companies. Automatic and unsupervised data exchange creates new attack vectors, which could be used by a malicious insider to leak secrets via an otherwise considered secure channel without anyone noticing. In this paper we reflect upon approaches to prevent the exposure of secret data via blockchain technology, while also providing auditable proof of data exchange. We show that previous blockchain based privacy protection approaches offer protection, but give the control of the data to (potentially not trustworthy) third parties, which also can be considered a privacy violation. The approach taken in this paper is not utilize centralized data storage for data. It realizes data confidentiality of P2P communication and data processing in smart contracts of blockchains.