MSLShard: An efficient sharding-based trust management framework for blockchain-empowered IoT access control

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used in modern smart areas such as smart cities, but data security remains a significant challenge. Blockchain-based IoT access control addresses data security issues by preventing unauthorized devices from accessing limited IoT resources. However, most existing blockchain-based access control schemes still have scalability and security issues. A lightweight and secure framework, MSLShard, is proposed for the blockchain-based access control via sharding, which consists of two parts. First, an adaptive network sharding scheme based on network distance, node credibility, and access frequency is designed in the cloud-edge-end collaboration-based IoT architecture to reduce nodes' storage pressure and improve the scheme's scalability. Second, the trust management based on multidimensional subjective logic explicitly portrays the heterogeneity among edge nodes to motivate cooperation and further improve the security of the blockchain. Experimental results show that MSLShard can achieve high scalability and security in large-scale IoT environments compared to existing methods.