Collaborative Access Control for IoT -- A Blockchain Approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based decentralized access control framework for IoT, addressing limitations of existing solutions by developing a new P2P infrastructure, a generic blockchain mechanism supporting multiple models, and a shortcut protocol to reduce access time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel P2P infrastructure, a versatile blockchain access control mechanism, and an optimized protocol to enhance efficiency and flexibility in IoT security.

Findings

The shortcut approach reduces access time by approximately 43%.

The framework supports multiple access control models.

The new P2P infrastructure seamlessly integrates with the blockchain framework.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates robust access control mechanisms to secure a vast array of interconnected devices. Most of the existing IoT systems in practice use centralized solutions. We identify the problems in such solutions and adopt the blockchain based decentralized access control approach. Though there are works in the literature that use blockchain for access control, there are some gaps in these works. We develop a blockchain embedded access control (BEAC) framework to bridge the gaps. First, blockchain based solutions for access control require an enabling P2P network while existing P2P overlays do not support some required features. We develop a novel P2P infrastructure to seamlessly support our BEAC framework. Second, most of the works consider blockchain based access control for a single access control model, and we develop a generic blockchain mechanism and show that it can support the embedding of various access control models. Finally, existing works adopt existing blockchain mechanisms which may incur a high communication overhead. We develop a shortcut approach to improve the number of message rounds in the access protocol. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our system, showing that the shortcut mechanism can reduces access time by approximately 43%.