Enabling Opportunistic Users in Multi-Tenant IoT Systems using Decentralized Identifiers and Permissioned Blockchains

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel decentralized authentication and authorization framework for multi-tenant IoT systems, enabling secure, privacy-preserving access for opportunistic users across untrusted entities using blockchain and decentralized identifiers.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, privacy-enhanced authorization mechanism leveraging decentralized identifiers and permissioned blockchains for multi-tenant IoT environments.

Findings

Supports fast revocation of access rights

Enables authorization of untrusted guest users

Provides privacy-preserving user management

Abstract

In this work, we leverage advances in decentralized identifiers and permissioned blockchains to build a flexible user authentication and authorization mechanism that offers enhanced privacy, achieves fast revocation, and supports distributed "policy decision points" executed in mutually untrusted entities. The proposed solution can be applied in multi-tenant "IoT hubs" that interconnect diverse IoT silos and enable authorization of "guest" users, i.e., opportunistic users that have no trust relationship with the system, which has not encountered or known them before.