A blockchain-based Access Control Mechanism for IOT
Houhui Yu, Taowei Chen, Jingyi Wang · 2022
Because of lightweight, large-scale and dynamic access characteristics in IoT devices, the current centralized access control mechanism leads to many security problems such as failure of single point, privacy leakage and user authentication. With the advent of blockchain technology, it could be a better way to address these problems by decentralized, transparent and immutability properties of blockchain. Thus, a blockchain-based access control mechanism for IOT is proposed based on the ABAC access control model. Firstly, the model architecture and access control workflow are developed in detail, and the data format of transactions in the blockchain is defined so as to facilitate the release, update, and revocation of attributes and policies. And then, the smart contracts on chain are programed to ensure that the conditions they set on access and sharing will be enforced. Finally, experimental simulation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient in policy-making and policy-querying. At the same time, the use of decentralized ABAC makes it much secure for decision-makers to control variables that ensure a fine-grained approach to access control.