SILedger: A Blockchain and ABE-based Access Control for Applications in SDN-IoT Networks

Abstract

The Software Defined Network in Internet of Things (SDN-IoT) is enjoying growing popularity due to its flexibility, automaticity and programmability. However, there is still a lack of proper permission management on SDN-IoT applications (SIApps), especially when the SIApp’s required northbound interfaces are located in multiple heterogeneous controllers without mutual trust. Existing access control methods are usually based on centralized models, proprietary controllers, trusting conditions or manual operations. It can incur unnecessary performance degradation and poor scalability. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a SIApps’ ledger (SILedger), an open, trusted, and decentralized access control mechanism based on blockchain and attribute-based encryption (ABE). It can not only support effective authorization of SIApps in heterogeneous and untrusted SDN-IoT control domains, but also record all interactions between SIApps and resources, and thus facilitate SIApps further charging, analysis and audit. The main idea is that the SIApps are authorized using access tokens encrypted by ABE, and these tokens are seen as the currency of blockchain to be distributed. Specifically, we re-design blockchain transaction, token encryption, token initialization and token update schemes to achieve cross-domain, fine-grained and flexible SIApps’ permission management. In order to mitigate the delay and complexity problem of blockchain and ABE, we devise an access control framework that separates authorization from call process of SIApps. Finally, we perform security analysis and implement a FISCO-BCOS-based prototype for SILedger. The experimental results show that it can provide effective access control for SIApps with negligible overheads.