Blockchain-Based IoT Access Control System: Towards Security, Lightweight, and Cross-Domain

Abstract

Most IoT devices cannot afford to be a blockchain node due to the high computation and storage loads. Thus, the blockchain is usually deployed on one delegate node, e.g., the edge device or cloud, which may encounters three drawbacks: (1) The delegate node becomes the single failure point when the number of delegate notes are limited. (2) The delegate node replicating the blockchain data can lead to privacy information leak. (3) The delegate node is vulnerable to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. To tackle these drawbacks, we consider to minimize the redundant of blockchain to make the IoT devices as the specialized blockchain nodes. In this paper, we integrate a permissioned blockchain (HLF), an attribute-based access control (ABAC) and an identity-based signature (IBS) to build a security, lightweight, and cross-domain blockchain-based IoT access control system. Specifically, we divided the IoT system into different function domains, named IoT domains. Then, we establish a local blockchain ledger for each IoT domain to enable more IoT devices as blockchain nodes. The local blockchain ledger records the IoT domain entities' attributes, policy files' digests, and access decisions. Meanwhile, we use the channel technology of HLF to realize cross-domain access and use the IBS to filter the legal access requests for each IoT domain to prevent DDoS attacks. We also design a policy decision point (PDP) selection algorithm that select multiple IoT devices (blockchain nodes) to achieve the real-time distributed policy decisions (off-chain). Finally, we implement and evaluate the proposed system to demonstrate its practicality.

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

“…Therefore, PKAM mitigates DDoS attacks by verifying access rights and preventing network traffic caused by fraudulent transactions. In addition, to avoid DDoS attacks, the authors in [ 109 ] design a Blocikchain-based access control system for IoT devices based on identity-based signature to enable servers to filter and forward access requests.…”

Comprehensive Survey of IoT, Machine Learning, and Blockchain for Health Care Applications: A Topical Assessment for Pandemic Preparedness, Challenges, and Solutions

“…The distributed architecture of blockchain happens to be an essential technology to solve the traditional single-point failure in IoT. A single point of failure in an IoT system may break the whole system, which is detrimental to achieving high reliability and availability in any system [236]; therefore, the peer-to-peer architecture in blockchain technology is a feasible solution to handle the bottleneck and the point of failure in an IoT system [237,238]. Additionally, peer-to-peer networks process and store the IoT data securely and efficiently [239].…”

How Can Applications of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Improve Performance of Internet of Things? -- A Survey

“…The mechanism proposed in [101] provides a suitable smart contract scheme for guaranteeing the integrity of IoT devices, and immutable and dynamic management of malicious applications. In [102], a blockchain ledger is established to make more blockchain Item Contributions [76] Blockchain-based communication architecture is based on Named Data Networking by integrating IoT systems. [61] Security auditing system is constructed to predict and detect any anomalies to guarantee confidentiality of data.…”

“…[101] Provides a suitable smart contract scheme for guaranteeing the integrity of IoT devices. [102] Designs a mechanism to select multiple IoT devices to enable the real-time policy decisions in a distributed way. [103] Proposes a proxy re-encryption mechanism for secure sharing of data in cloud environments.…”