Owing to the technology of 5G and beyond, collaborative edge computing-as-a-service has enabled trillions of interconnected edge applications. It has also become a prospective paradigm for providing computing services by offloading computationally intensive assignments to mobile-edge servers or fog nodes due to terminals constrained computing and caching resources. Nevertheless, in this process, trust of computing-as-a-service scheduling and edge data sharing in heterogeneous systems is an unavoidable challenge of paramount importance. As a powerful tool that addresses security issues, blockchains can ensure the trustworthiness and irreversibility of computing data by consensus mechanisms. However, in the Industrial Internet of Energy (IIoE), the storage burden of a single blockchain has increased. Therefore, from the perspective of a stable real-time operation, we propose a multiedgechain structure that accommodates thousands of edge data and promotes on-chain data efficiency to achieve cross-chain edge data sharing for heterogeneous blockchain systems. Moreover, aiming at the profits of computing resource scheduling in the IIoE, a two-stage Stackelberg game strategy with an optimal scheduling demand and reward is provided considering the edge user’s preferences and risk factors. Finally, the simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed scheme, regarding the game equilibrium, utility optimization, and data sharing efficiency of cloud–edge collaboration.

With the rapid deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in various industries and fields, the massive amount of data produced by these devices can yield greater value through sharing. A critical challenge in the data-sharing process is ensuring that the data are high quality. However, the quality of data provided by a large number of IoT devices is impacted by the variability of factors contributing to the data quality (DQ). Effective and safe sharing of perception data by the limited resources of IoT devices is a problem worth investigating. In this article, we propose a smart contract-based and DQ-driven incentive mechanism. First, a smart contract is proposed to realize security in the data-sharing process, while the proposed DQ evaluation mechanism ensures the quality of the shared data. Second, a two-layer Stackelberg game of nested coalitional (TLSNC) scheme is designed to obtain the maximum overall social welfare according to the trust score obtained during DQ evaluation while satisfying the limitation of loose and insufficient computing resources. Moreover, we designed a smart contract for automatic execution of the data-sharing transaction and used a trusted execution environment (TEE) to complete the security calculation of shared data. Finally, the numerical results reveal the effectiveness of the DQ evaluation mechanism and the security of our TEE-based model. Based on the proposed scheme, sustainable incentives for user participation and high-quality data sharing can be achieved. In addition, our system can significantly improve the overall social welfare compared to traditional solutions.

To solve the problems of vote forgery and malicious election of candidate nodes in the Raft consensus algorithm, we combine zero trust with the Raft consensus algorithm and propose a secure and efficient consensus algorithm -Verifiable Secret Sharing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Raft Consensus Algorithm (VSSB-Raft). The VSSB-Raft consensus algorithm realizes zero trust through the supervisor node and secret sharing algorithm without the invisible trust between nodes required by the algorithm. Meanwhile, the VSSB-Raft consensus algorithm uses the SM2 signature algorithm to realize the characteristics of zero trust requiring authentication before data use. In addition, by introducing the NDN network, we redesign the communication between nodes and guarantee the communication quality among nodes. The VSSB-Raft consensus algorithm proposed in this paper can make the algorithm Byzantine fault tolerant by setting a threshold for secret sharing while maintaining the algorithm’s complexity to be O(n). Experiments show that the VSSB-Raft consensus algorithm is secure and efficient with high throughput and low consensus latency.

Internet of things (IoT) development tends to reduce the reliance on centralized servers. The zero-trust distributed system combined with blockchain technology has become a hot topic in IoT research. However, distribution data storage services and different blockchain protocols make network interoperability and cross-platform more complex. Relay chain is a promising cross-chain technology that solves the complexity and compatibility issues associated with blockchain cross-chain transactions by utilizing relay blockchains as cross-chain connectors. Yet relay chain cross-chain transactions need to collect asset information and implement asset transactions via two-way peg. Due to the release of user transaction information, there is the issue of privacy leakage. In this article, we propose a cross-chain privacy protection protocol based on the Groth16 zero-knowledge proof algorithm and coin-mixing technology, which changes the authentication mechanism and uses a combination of generating functions to map virtual external addresses in transactions. It allows fast cross-chain anonymous transactions while hiding the genuine user’s address. The experiment shows that, in a zero-trust IoT context, our scheme can effectively protect user privacy information, accomplish controlled transaction traceability operations, and guarantee cross-chain transaction security.

The Internet of Things that links the cyber and physical worlds brings revolutionary changes to society, however, its security and efficiency problems have not been solved. The Consortium Blockchain + IoT is considered to be an effective solution. The IoT blockchain network’s demand for transaction processing speed is gradually increasing. The throughput problem of the blockchain needs to be solved urgently and the security problem of transaction processing that comes with it. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a reputation-driven dynamic node security sharding consensus model (RDSCM) in the blockchain, which consists of two parts: a reputation-driven node to eliminate PBFT (RE-PBFT) and a reputation-driven node cross reconfiguration sharding scheme (NCRS). The RE-PBFT eliminates abnormal nodes in the consensus network and reduces the probability of abnormal nodes becoming master nodes. NCRS improves the blockchain throughput while ensuring sharding reliability. Finally, the experiment proves that RE-PBFT can identify abnormal nodes and remove them in a short time. NCRS can effectively guarantee the reliability of sharding, and the transaction processing efficiency has been greatly improved after sharding.