Collaborative Trust Blockchain Based Unbiased Control Transfer Mechanism for Industrial Automation

Chen, Jianing, Wu, Jun, Liang, Haoran, Mumtaz, Shahid, Li, Jianhua, Konstantin, Kostromitin, Bashir, Ali Kashif and Nawaz, Raheel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9588-0052 (2020) Collaborative Trust Blockchain Based Unbiased Control Transfer Mechanism for Industrial Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, 56 (4). pp. 4478-4488. ISSN 0093-9994

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Abstract

In industrial automation, numerous devices are interconnected in smart factories for further monitor and control. Various infrastructure devices in industrial automation are usually used for control instruction distribution, data collection, and collaboration of the industrial applications. Recent security threats on industrial automation are more frequent and the industrial control systems (ICS) lack trust mechanism. Blockchain has been introduced due to its decentralization and security promise, but the election results in the original designs could be biased without collaboration trust, which leads the blockchain based industry applications invalid. What’s more, in existing solutions, neither supernodes nor normal nodes in blockchain can transfer their control authorities for disaster backup. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a collaborative trust based unbiased control transfer mechanism (CTM), which realizes a dynamic assignment of industrial control. First, a collaborative trust based delegated proof of stake (CT-DPoS) consensus is proposed for determining the authorities of control dynamically and unbiasedly, by designing a lightweight trust propagation (TP) protocol. Second, a control transfer mechanism for checking, alarming, and restarting CTM is devised for the disaster backup. The simulation results demonstrate the CTM is feasible and effective for industrial automation security.