Collaborative Access Control for IoT - A Blockchain Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates robust access control mechanisms to secure a vast array of interconnected devices. We adopt the blockchain based decentralized access control approach and identify the gaps in existing works. Then, 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 platforms which may incur a high communication overhead. We design a more efficient consortium blockchain solution by leveraging more advanced components to achieve better performance. Our experiments demonstrate that our design can cut the communication cost to half compared to the most recent Hyperledger Fabric platform.