A Consortium Blockchain-Based Access Control Framework With Dynamic Orderer Node Selection for 5G-Enabled Industrial IoT

Abstract

5G-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deployment will bring more severe security and privacy challenges, which puts forward higher requirements for access control. Blockchain-based access control method has become a promising security technology, but it still faces high latency in consensus process and weak adaptability to dynamic changes in network environment. This article proposes a novel access control framework for 5G-enabled IIoT based on consortium blockchain. We design three types of chaincodes for the framework named policy management chaincode (PMC), access control chaincode (ACC), and credit evaluation chaincode (CEC). The PMC and ACC are deployed on the same data channel to implement the management of access control policies and the authorization of access. The CEC deployed on another channel is used to add behavior records collected from IIoT devices and calculate the credit value of IIoT domain. Specifically, we design a two-step credit-based Raft consensus mechanism, which can select the orderer nodes dynamically to achieve fast and reliable consensus based on historical behavior records stored in the ledger. Furthermore, we implement the proposed framework on a real-world testbed and compare it with the framework based on practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus. The experiment results show that our proposed framework can maintain lower consensus cost time with 100 ms level and achieves four to five times throughput with lower hardware resource consumption and communication consumption. Besides, our design also improves the security and robustness of the access control process.