A Novel Attribute-Based Access Control Scheme Using Blockchain for IoT

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 38431 - 38441
• Main Authors: Ding, Sheng, Cao, Jin, Li, Chen, Fan, Kai, Li, Hui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access control; attribute-based access control; Authentication; Authorization; Blockchain; consortium blockchain; Control systems; Cryptography; Electronic devices; Internet of Things; Security; Security management; System effectiveness
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2905846

With the sharp increase in the number of intelligent devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained more and more attention and rapid development in recent years. It effectively integrates the physical world with the Internet over existing network infrastructure to facilitate sharing data among intelligent devices. However, its complex and large-scale network structure brings new security risks and challenges to IoT systems. To ensure the security of data, traditional access control technologies are not suitable to be directly used for implementing access control in IoT systems because of their complicated access management and the lack of credibility due to centralization. In this paper, we proposed a novel attribute-based access control scheme for IoT systems, which simplifies greatly the access management. We use blockchain technology to record the distribution of attributes in order to avoid single point failure and data tampering. The access control process has also been optimized to meet the need for high efficiency and lightweight calculation for IoT devices. The security and performance analysis show that our scheme could effectively resist multiple attacks and be efficiently implemented in IoT systems.