Blockchain Meets IoT: An Architecture for Scalable Access Management in IoT

TLDR

The Internet of Things is maturing into a core part of the future Internet, yet managing billions of devices worldwide remains a challenge, and existing centralized access‑management technologies impose global limitations. This paper proposes a new architecture for arbitrating roles and permissions in IoT. The architecture is a fully distributed access‑control system built on blockchain, supported by a proof‑of‑concept implementation and evaluated in realistic IoT scenarios. Results indicate that blockchain can serve as an access‑management technology in specific scalable IoT scenarios.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity and establishing itself as a part of the future Internet. One of the technical challenges of having billions of devices deployed worldwide is the ability to manage them. Although access management technologies exist in IoT, they are based on centralized models which introduce a new variety of technical limitations to manage them globally. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for arbitrating roles and permissions in IoT. The new architecture is a fully distributed access control system for IoT based on blockchain technology. The architecture is backed by a proof of concept implementation and evaluated in realistic IoT scenarios. The results show that the blockchain technology could be used as access management technology in specific scalable IoT scenarios.