An Attribute‐Based Access Control Model for Internet of Things Using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging from its infancy and establishing itself as a component of the future Internet. However, the ability to manage a huge number of IoT devices is one of the IoT technical challenges. To implement access control, traditional schemes typically rely on a trusted central organization. Traditional centralized access control systems of the IoT lead to the shortcomings of a single point of failure, low overall system efficiency, and ethical and privacy issues. To overcome such challenges, an attribute‐based access control model using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain (ABAC‐HLFBC) is proposed in this paper. By adopting ABAC, it is no longer to create access control lists (ACLs) or assign roles to all system users. Instead, ABAC grants access based on the attributes presented by the target. No one is permitted access unless he/she possesses sufficient attributes that correspond to the access policy. The Hyperledger Fabric Raft consensus mechanism has been used to verify the transaction on the proposed model because it has a demanding feature for faster and less complicated consensus in comparison to the Kafka ordering service. To evaluate the proposed model, it has been tested against the most recent previous work, called fabric‐iot model. The proposed model has been tested and evaluated in two parts. The first part tests the cost time using a client test program written in Golang. The second part tests the latency and throughput using the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool. Results show that the proposed model efficiently outperforms the previous work in terms of the performance metrics mentioned above.