Blockchain-Based Access Control for IoT in Smart Home Systems

Abstract

Smart home systems are featured by a variety of connected smart household devices, where Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the critical enablers in the smart home environment. Since these smart home IoT devices are working collaboratively, the access control among the IoT devices becomes more and more important because non-authorised access can result in resource misuse, home breach threats or private information disclosure. Thus, an effective access control in smart home systems is essential to prevent from unauthorized use of the available resources. However, most of the access control schemes in smart home systems are still lack of decentralized peer trust and hard to control the security and credibility of the smart home IoT network. This paper therefore proposes a Blockchain-based Access Control (BAC) solution by integrating the Blockchain technique to IoT networks, where the agent-based policy is proposed to improve the efficiency of the Blockchain management. In order to validate the BAC solution, we demonstrate the implementation process of the proposed BAC in the parental control scenario and also evaluate performance and feasibility in a simulated smart home.