Efficient Distributed Authentication and Access Control System Management for Internet of Things Using Blockchain

Internet of things (IoT) enables a huge network of connected devices inter-working and collaborating to provide relevant services and applications. This technology entered the market and is expected to grow in the upcoming years, as the critical questions related to the management and communication security continue to be challenging research problems. Current solutions of access control system management that enables communication between devices depend mainly on the use of digital certificates for authentication. However, such an approach imposes significant overhead on IoT devices since it is computationally demanding and requires validation of the certificate within a limited period. In addition, relying on a central node for deciding on issuing and revoking certificates introduces a single point of failure and could even risk the safety of personal information or physical damages related to IoT services. In this paper, we propose a new distributed authentication and access control system management for IoT by the use of Blockchain technology to keep track of the certificate of each IoT device (valid or revoked) in distributed and immutable records. In essence we replace certificate verification with a lightweight blockchain-based authentication approach. In addition, we propose a fully distributed IoT admission/revocation scheme. We show that our scheme could alleviate the computation overhead and enhance the response time while improving the overall system security.