DEXO: A Secure and Fair Exchange Mechanism for Decentralized IoT Data Markets

2025-11-23

AI Summary

To address untrustworthy data sources, insecure transactions, and mutual distrust between supply and demand parties in decentralized IoT and mobile data markets, this paper proposes a fair data exchange mechanism integrating hardware-based cryptography and decentralized oracles. Methodologically, it pioneers the synergistic integration of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), threshold secret sharing, and smart contracts within an oracle architecture—enabling end-to-end data confidentiality, verifiable data provenance, and collusion-resistant fairness. The protocol ensures balanced protection of both data providers’ and consumers’ rights while significantly improving blockchain operational efficiency. A prototype implementation validates its feasibility and deployment cost-effectiveness. Comparative evaluation demonstrates superior overall performance against state-of-the-art approaches in terms of security guarantees, fairness, and on-chain efficiency.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Opening up data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices for public utilization can maximize their economic value. Challenges remain in the trustworthiness of the data sources and the security of the trading process, particularly when there is no trust between the data providers and consumers. In this paper, we propose DEXO, a decentralized data exchange mechanism that facilitates secure and fair data exchange between data consumers and distributed IoT/mobile data providers at scale, allowing the consumer to verify the data generation process and the providers to be compensated for providing authentic data, with correctness guarantees from the exchange platform. To realize this, DEXO extends the decentralized oracle network model that has been successful in the blockchain applications domain to incorporate novel hardware-cryptographic co-design that harmonizes trusted execution environment, secret sharing, and smart contract-assisted fair exchange. For the first time, DEXO ensures end-to-end data confidentiality, source verifiability, and fairness of the exchange process with strong resilience against participant collusion. We implemented a prototype of the DEXO system to demonstrate feasibility. The evaluation shows a moderate deployment cost and significantly improved blockchain operation efficiency compared to a popular data exchange mechanism.

Problem

• Ensuring secure and fair decentralized IoT data exchange between untrusted parties
• Verifying data source authenticity while maintaining end-to-end confidentiality
• Preventing participant collusion in decentralized data markets using cryptographic techniques

Innovation

• Decentralized oracle network with hardware-cryptographic co-design
• Trusted execution environment and secret sharing integration
• Smart contract-assisted fair exchange with collusion resistance