Blockchain Meets IoT: An Architecture for Scalable Access Management in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity and establishing itself as a part of the future Internet. One of the technical challenges of having billions of devices deployed worldwide is the ability to manage them. Although access management technologies exist in IoT, they are based on centralized models which introduce a new variety of technical limitations to manage them globally. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for arbitrating roles and permissions in IoT. The new architecture is a fully distributed access control system for IoT based on blockchain technology. The architecture is backed by a proof of concept implementation and evaluated in realistic IoT scenarios. The results show that the blockchain technology could be used as access management technology in specific scalable IoT scenarios.

[1]  Satoshi Nakamoto.  Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[2]  Håkan Sivencrona,et al.  Byzantine Fault Tolerance, from Theory to Reality , 2003, SAFECOMP.

[3]  Hajar Mousannif,et al.  Access control in the Internet of Things: Big challenges and new opportunities , 2017, Comput. Networks.

[4]  Daniel Davis Wood,et al.  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2014 .

[5]  Markus Jakobsson,et al.  Proofs of Work and Bread Pudding Protocols , 1999, Communications and Multimedia Security.

[6]  Nirwan Ansari,et al.  Dynamic Resource Caching in the IoT Application Layer for Smart Cities , 2018, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

[7]  Juan Carlos De Martin,et al.  Blockchain for the Internet of Things: A systematic literature review , 2016, 2016 IEEE/ACS 13th International Conference of Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA).

[8]  Andrew Birrell,et al.  Implementing Remote procedure calls , 1983, SOSP '83.

[9]  Abdellah Ait Ouahman,et al.  Towards a Novel Privacy-Preserving Access Control Model Based on Blockchain Technology in IoT , 2017 .

[10]  Nirwan Ansari,et al.  EdgeIoT: Mobile Edge Computing for the Internet of Things , 2016, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[11]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data , 2015, 2015 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops.

[12]  Stefan Dziembowski,et al.  Proofs of Space , 2015, CRYPTO.

[13]  Carsten Bormann,et al.  The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) , 2014, RFC.

[14]  Eric Rescorla,et al.  Datagram Transport Layer Security Version 1.2 , 2012, RFC.

[15]  Aviv Zohar,et al.  Secure High-Rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin , 2015, Financial Cryptography.

[16]  Giuseppe Ateniese,et al.  From Pretty Good to Great: Enhancing PGP Using Bitcoin and the Blockchain , 2015, NSS.

[17]  Piyush Jha,et al.  DeyPoS: Deduplicatable Dynamic Proof of Storage for Multi-User Environments , 2017 .

[18]  Anas Abou El Kalam,et al.  FairAccess: a new Blockchain-based access control framework for the Internet of Things , 2016, Secur. Commun. Networks.

[19]  Nick Szabo,et al.  Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks , 1997, First Monday.

[20]  Cheng Li,et al.  A Blockchain Based New Secure Multi-Layer Network Model for Internet of Things , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Congress on Internet of Things (ICIOT).