An Attribute-Based Collaborative Access Control Scheme Using Blockchain for IoT Devices

TLDR

The Internet of Things integrates physical devices into the real world, but its widespread distribution and limited resources make it vulnerable to unauthorized access, posing significant privacy and security challenges. The paper seeks to enhance IoT access control to better manage authorization challenges. The authors propose an attribute‑based, decentralized, fine‑grained access control scheme that leverages blockchain for authentic credentials, a verifiable collaboration mechanism for emergency authorization, and authority nodes to perform heavy computations. Security analysis confirms the scheme reliably protects authorized access, and a prototype demonstrates its scalability, efficiency, and suitability for IoT devices.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) benefits our lives by integrating physical devices to the real world and offers a crucial internet infrastructure for future civilization. Because IoT devices are widely distributed and restricted in resources, it is difficult for them to adopt traditional security methods to resist malicious attacks. Unauthorized access to IoT devices, which results in severe privacy and security problems, has become a major challenge that has impeded IoT technology from being widely adopted. Therefore, the access control for IoT devices urgently needs to be improved when dealing with authorization issues. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based access control scheme that provides decentralized, flexible, and fine-grained authorization for IoT devices. Blockchain is utilized to provide authentic and reliable credentials. More importantly, a verifiable collaboration mechanism is designed to meet the needs of controlled access authorization in emergencies. Authority nodes are constructed to execute major computation tasks and interact with the blockchain. The security analysis shows that our scheme can reliably guarantee the security of authorized access. More than security assurance, a proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented to prove that our scheme is scalable, efficient, and accommodates IoT devices well.