Blockchain Meets Generative Behavior Steganography: A Novel Covert Communication Framework for Secure IoT Edge Computing

The rapid development of Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing technologies has brought forth numerous possibilities for the intelligent and digital future. The frequent communication and interaction between devices inevitably generate a large amount of sensitive information. Deploying a blockchain network to store sensitive data is crucial for ensuring privacy and security. The openness and synchronicity of blockchain networks give rise to challenges such as transaction privacy and storage capacity issues, significantly impeding their development in the context of edge computing and IoT. This paper proposes a reliable fog computing service solution based on a blockchain fog architecture. This paper stores data files in the inter planetary file system (IPFS) and encrypts the file hash values used for retrieving data files with stream cipher encryption. It employs a steganographic transmission technique leveraging AlphaZero’s Gomoku algorithm to discretely transmit the stream cipher key across the blockchain network without a carrier, thus achieving dual encryption. This approach aims to mitigate the storage burden on the blockchain network while ensuring the security of transaction data. Experimental results demonstrate that the model enhances the transmission capacity of confidential information from kilobytes (KB) to megabytes (MB) and exhibits high levels of covert and security features.