Abstract
While Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been widely recognized as an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new challenges in terms of privacy and security. Access control (AC) is among the top security concerns, which is critical in resource and information protection over IoT devices. Traditional access control approaches, like Access Control Lists (ACL), Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC), are not able to provide a scalable, manageable and efficient mechanism to meet the requirements of IoT systems. Another weakness in today’s AC is the centralized authorization server, which can cause a performance bottleneck or be the single point of failure. Inspired by the smart contract on top of a blockchain protocol, this paper proposes BlendCAC, which is a decentralized, federated capability-based AC mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services and information in large-scale IoT systems. A federated capability-based delegation model (FCDM) is introduced to support hierarchical and multi-hop delegation. The mechanism for delegate authorization and revocation is explored. A robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of the smart contract for registration, propagation, and revocation of the access authorization. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices (i.e., Raspberry PI nodes) and more powerful computing devices (i.e., laptops) and tested on a local private blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained AC solution for IoT systems.
Highlights
With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of physical devices are being connected to the Internet at an unprecedented scale
We proposed a partially decentralized federated Capability-based Access Control framework that leverages smart contract and blockchain technology, called BlendCAC, to handle the challenges in access control strategies for IoT devices
IoT network environment to verify the feasibility of the proposed BlendCAC
Summary
With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of physical devices are being connected to the Internet at an unprecedented scale. The prevalence of IoT devices has changed human activity by ubiquitously providing applications and services that have revolutionized transportation, healthcare, industrial automation, emergency response, and so on [1] These capabilities offer both measurement data and information context for situation awareness (SAW) [2,3]. While benefiting from the large-scale applications like Smart Grid and Smart Cities, IoT systems incur new concerns for security and privacy With their increased popularity, connected smart IoT devices without sufficient security measures increase the risk of privacy breaches and various attacks. Security issues, such as privacy, authentication, access control, system configuration, information storage and management, are the main challenges that these IoT-based applications are facing [4]. The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model [10] provides a framework that specifies user access authorization to resources based on roles, and supports principles, such as least privilege, partition of administrative functions and separation of duties [11] in computer systems
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