Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 6; no. 2; pp. 1594 - 1605
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yuanyu, Kasahara, Shoji, Shen, Yulong, Jiang, Xiaohong, Wan, Jianxiong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.04.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access control; blockchain; Case studies; Contracts; Control methods; Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); Permission; Personal computers; Registers; Security management; Servers; smart contract; Trustworthiness
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2018.2847705

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC), and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update, and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC, and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.