Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things

Abstract

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC) and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.

Interledger Smart Contracts for Decentralized Authorization to Constrained Things

“…RELATED WORK The work in [16] presents a blockchain-based decentralized authorization system where authorization proofs can be efficiently verified. The work in [17] presents a decentralized access control system where IoT devices are required to interact directly with the blockchain and are assumed to be always connected, while [18], [19] present solutions where policies and access control decisions are directly recorded on Bitcoin's blockchain. The work in [20] present a system based on OAuth 2.0 where a smart contract generates authorization tokens, which a key server verifies in order to provide private keys that allow clients to access a protected resource.…”

Delay and Communication Tradeoffs for Blockchain Systems With Lightweight IoT Clients

“…This section introduces the main components of the Ethereum protocol [15], that is a popular choice for blockchain systems tailored for IoT applications [3], [16], [17]. The common trait of Ethereum with other blockchain protocols can be found in [18].…”

OAuth 2.0 meets Blockchain for Authorization in Constrained IoT Environments

“…The work in [14] presents a blockchain-based decentralized access control system where IoT devices interact directly with the blockchain and are always connected, while [15] presents a system where policies and access control events are directly recorded on Bitcoin's blockchain. [16] presents a smart contract-based system for providing access control to IoT devices while satisfying access policies in terms of the minimum time interval between consecutive accesses. The above works all assume that the IoT device can directly access the blockchain, which is not possible in constrained IoT environments.…”