Decentralized Access Control for Internet of Things Using Decentralized Identifiers and Multi-signature Smart Contracts

Abstract

The number of connected devices is growing enormously every year, and with the rapid development of 5G technology, it is expected to grow even more. The Internet of Things (IoT) deals with different types of information in different applications, including a huge amount of sensitive and personal information, so IoT security and privacy is becoming a major concern. Most IoT devices interact not only with the owner, but also with various third parties and its heterogeneity makes authentication and access control a challenging task. A new concept such as Decentralized Identifier (DID), which is unified identity that does not require a centralized trust anchor, has been gaining a lot of interest in both academia and industry recently. In this paper, we propose decentralized access control framework for Internet of Things utilizing smart contracts and DIDs. In our framework access control is managed by decentralized oracles using multi-signature for agreements to overcome single point of failure problem.