Pruning Blockchain Protocols for Efficient Access Control in IoT Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pruning blockchain protocol for IoT access control that reduces communication overhead and improves efficiency through shortcut mechanisms and hierarchical access control, validated by experimental results.

Contribution

It presents a novel pruning blockchain protocol with shortcut and hierarchy-based access control methods tailored for IoT systems, enhancing performance over existing blockchain solutions.

Findings

Shortcut mechanism reduces access time by ~43%.

R&D-BAC outperforms traditional RBAC by over two times.

Protocol achieves high efficiency in access validation and policy management.

Abstract

We consider access control for IoT systems that involves shared accesses to the IoT devices as well as their data. Since IoT devices are dispersed all over the edge of the Internet, traditional centralized access control has problems. Blockchain based decentralized access control is thus the new solution trend. However, existing blockchain based access control methods do not focus on performance issues and may incur a high communication overhead. In this paper, we develop a Pruning Blockchain based Access Control (PBAC) protocol to cutdown the unnecessary message rounds and achieve high efficiency in access validations and policy management. The protocol includes a shortcut and a Role and Device Hierarchy-Based Access Control (R&D-BAC) approaches for different environment settings. To realize the PBAC protocol, it is necessary to carefully engineer the system architecture, which is also discussed in the paper. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the PBAC protocol, specifically, the shortcut mechanism reduces access time by approximately 43%, and R&D-BAC outperforms traditional blockchain based RBAC by more than two folds.