DAC4SH: A Novel Data Access Control Scheme for Smart Home Using Smart Contracts

Abstract

Smart home (s-home) is an important Internet of Things (IoT)-based application in improving the living environment. Many cryptography-based protection schemes have been proposed to guarantee data confidentiality in s-home. Access control is a promising method to protect generated data from unauthorized access, and it is also urgently needed in s-home. Current centralized access control schemes are not excellent in security and performance. For instance, it still faces the problems of a single point of failure, low reliability, and poor scalability. This study proposes a decentralized and reliable access control scheme for s-home using smart contracts, named DAC4SH. To be specific, this proposed framework consists of an access policy management contract (APMC), a data attribute management contract (DAMC), a subject attribute management contract (SAMC), and a data access control contract (DACC) for realizing the fine-grained data access control. Meanwhile, we record all the access activities into the immutable distributed ledgers for auditing. To verify the feasibility of our DAC4SH, we construct an Ethereum-based prototype system and evaluate the performance of DAC4SH in terms of computational and communication costs. According to the experimental results, we can conclude that the performance of DAC4SH is appropriate.