Blockchain on Security and Forensics Management in Edge Computing for IoT: A Comprehensive Survey

Security and forensics represent two key components for network management, especially to guarantee the trusted operation of massive access networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT). As a core technology to provide low latency and high communication for IoT, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) pulls computing resources from remote cloud centers to devices. The process of MEC service involves three types of entities: devices, data generated by devices and digital evidence generated after the data interaction. These entities are fully distributed and difficult to protect through traditional, highly centralized security and authentication mechanisms. As a decentralized shared ledger and database, the emerging blockchain is considered to provide cooperative trust and collaborative action among multiple subjects while ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of data. Because of its anonymity, non-tampering and traceability, the blockchain arouses research on the combination of blockchain and edge computing for device security, data security and forensics in IoT. This survey analyzes the application of blockchain in MEC-IoT systems and mainly focuses on approaches and technologies to manage the security and forensics issues for IoT. Finally, we present open issues and prospects for future work and research directions.