A Fine-grained Access Control Model with Enhanced Flexibility and On-chain Policy Execution for IoT Systems

Abstract

Blockchain-based access control mechanisms have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their potential to address the security and privacy challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. IoT devices generate massive amounts of data that are often transmitted to cloud-based servers for processing and storage. However, these devices are vulnerable to attacks and unauthorized access, which can lead to data breaches and privacy violations. Blockchain-based access control mechanisms can provide a secure and decentralized solution to these issues. This paper presents an improved Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) approach with enhanced flexibility, which utilizes decentralized identity management on the Substrate Framework, codifies access control policies by Rust programming language, and executes access control policies on-chain. The proposed design ensures trust and security while enhancing flexibility compared to existing works. In addition, we implement a PoC to demonstrate the feasibility and investigate its effectiveness.