Trinity: A Distributed Publish/Subscribe Broker with Blockchain-based Immutability

Abstract

Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Supply Chain monitoring applications rely on messaging protocols for exchanging data. Contemporary IoT deployments widely use the publish-subscribe messaging model because of its resource-efficiency. However, the systems with publish-subscribe messaging model employ a centralized architecture, wherein the data from all the devices in the application network flows via a central broker to the subscribers. Such a centralized architecture make publish-subscribe messaging model susceptible to a central point of failure. Besides, it provides an opportunity for the organization that owns the broker to tamper with the data. In this work, we contribute Trinity, a novel distributed publish-subscribe broker with blockchain-based immutability. Trinity distributes the data published to one of the brokers in the network to all the brokers in the network. The distributed data is stored in an immutable ledger through the use of the blockchain technology. Furthermore, Trinity executes smart contracts to validate the data before saving the data on the blockchain. Through the use of a blockchain network, Trinity can guarantee persistence, ordering, and immutability across trust boundaries. Our evaluation results show that Trinity consumes minimal resources, and the use of smart contracts enable the stakeholders to automate the data management processes. To the best of our knowledge, Trinity is the first framework that combines the components of the blockchain technology with the publish-subscribe messaging model.