A Blockchain-Assisted Authentication for SDN-IoT Network Using Smart Contract

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing technology due to the demand for automation in various industries, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and home automation etc. As IoT devices continue to proliferate, authentication and access control remain a major challenge. By verifying the identity of the device and the user, authentication helps prevent fraudulent activities and ensure that the IoT data is not tampered with. The existing works are dependent on a centralized server which can become overwhelmed by large users, making them difficult to scale. In this work, we greatly utilize the characteristics of Blockchain to authenticate the user in the Software-Defined Network based IoT (SDN-IoT) network. The SDN provides centralized management of growing IoT devices. Blockchain is a decentralised and tamper-proof method for storing and sharing authentication information making it suitable for the system. We generate a digital token for each device access request through Smart Contract. The token manager on the Smart Contract validates the token for each user before giving access to it. The Smart Contract can revoke the token on unsuccessful authentication from the user to avoid an attack on the system. We conduct an experiment on the potency of the proposed work by testing the Smart Contract based on authentication delay, transaction cost and ability to resist the attack. The experiment result shows that the proposed work is a promising solution for authentication in SDN-IoT networks.