Ether-IoT: A Realtime Lightweight and Scalable Blockchain-Enabled Cache Algorithm for IoT Access Control

Abstract

Several unique characteristics of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as distributed deployment and limited storage, make it challenging for standard centralized access control systems to enable access control in today’s large-scale IoT ecosystem. To solve these challenges, this study presents an IoT access control system called Ether-IoT based on the Ethereum Blockchain (BC) infrastructure with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). Access Contract (AC), Cache Contract (CC), Device Contract (DC), and Policy Contract (PC) are the four central smart contracts (SCs) that are included in the proposed system. CC offers a way to save user characteristics in a local cache system to avoid delays during transactions between BC and IoT devices. AC is the fundamental program users typically need to run to build an access control technique. DC offers a means for storing the resource data created by devices and a method for querying that data. PC offers administrative settings to handle ABAC policies on users’ behalf. Ether-IoT, combined with ABAC and the BC, enables IoT access control management that is decentralized, fine-grained and dynamically scalable. This research gives a real-world case study to illustrate the suggested framework’s implementation. In the end, a simulation experiment is performed to evaluate the system’s performance. To ensure data integrity in dispersed systems, the results show that Ether-IoT can sustain high throughput in contexts with a large number of requests.