IoT-CCAC: a blockchain-based consortium capability access control approach for IoT

Abstract

Access control is a critical aspect for improving the privacy and security of IoT systems. A consortium is a public or private association or a group of two or more institutes, businesses, and companies that collaborate to achieve common goals or form a resource pool to enable the sharing economy aspect. However, most access control methods are based on centralized solutions, which may lead to problems like data leakage and single-point failure. Blockchain technology has its intrinsic feature of distribution, which can be used to tackle the centralized problem of traditional access control schemes. Nevertheless, blockchain itself comes with certain limitations like the lack of scalability and poor performance. To bridge the gap of these problems, here we present a decentralized capability-based access control architecture designed for IoT consortium networks named IoT-CCAC. A blockchain-based database is utilized in our solution for better performance since it exhibits favorable features of both blockchain and conventional databases. The performance of IoT-CCAC is evaluated to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed architecture. IoT-CCAC is a secure, salable, effective solution that meets the enterprise and business’s needs and adaptable for different IoT interoperability scenarios.

An Attribute-Based Access Control Model for Internet of Things Using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

“…Recently, there has been a significant amount of industry investment and interest from academia to solve major research challenges in blockchain technology, which can be summarized as follows: (1) Although blockchain-based access control has emerged as a promising security technology, it still suffers from high latency in the consensus process and poor adaptability to dynamic changes in the network environment. (2) Blockchain is not designed to store large amounts of data, which typically necessitates the proper integration of on-chain and off-chain databases to handle specific tasks [17]. (3) Performance and scalability have always been major issues with blockchain technology.…”

“…(3) Performance and scalability have always been major issues with blockchain technology. Regardless of recent improvements in transaction execution and validation performance by introducing lighter consensus mechanisms and more efficient transaction schemes as in Hyperledger Fabric, the performance and scalability of blockchain-based access control solutions cannot compete with current centralized solutions [17]. (4) Even if blockchain can guarantee the immutability of data in the chain and identify transformations, data that enters the blockchain corrupted remains corrupted.…”

“…However, the authors did not execute the proposed architecture to test its security. Bouras et al [17] proposed IoT-CCAC, an IoT consortium capability-based access control model. The authors prioritized data exchange and interoperability by organizing access control data into assets, services, and profiles to make the solution granular and flexible enough to be more suitable for IoT rapid growth and scalability.…”

“…The CBAC methods rely heavily on centralized solutions, which can lead to a variety of issues [17]. OAuth-IoT [48] is a capability-based access control model that implements the OAuth protocol in the IoT domain.…”

Unified Authentication and Access Control for Future Mobile Communication‐Based Lightweight IoT Systems Using Blockchain

“…IoT in many industries and formats may be installed everywhere. Such gadgets can talk with each other, acquire, share, and process data to provide a service [1]. Analysts at CISCO, Ericsson, as well as other organizations predict that by 2020, there will be more than 45 billion devices that are interconnected [2].…”