A privacy-aware authentication and usage-controlled access protocol for IIoT decentralized data marketplace

Data is ubiquitous, powerful and valuable today. With vast instalments of Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) infrastructure, data is in abundance albeit sitting in organizational silos. Data Marketplaces have emerged to allow monetization of data by trading it with interested buyers. While centralized marketplaces are common, they are controlled by few and are non-transparent. Decentralized data marketplaces allow the democratization of rates, trading terms and fine control to participants. However, in such a marketplace, ensuring privacy and security is crucial. Existing data exchange schemes depend on a trusted third party for key management during authentication and rely on a ‘one-time-off’ approach to authorization. This paper proposes a user-empowered, privacy-aware, authentication and usage-controlled access protocol for IIoT data marketplace. The proposed protocol leverages the concept of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and is based on the standards of Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC). DIDs empower buyers and give them complete control over their identities. The buyers authenticate and prove claims to access data securely using VC. The proposed protocol also implements a dynamic user-revocation policy. Usage-controlled based access provides secure ongoing authorization during data exchange. A detailed performance and security analysis is provided to show its feasibility.