A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the vast development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem, various types of information, such as healthcare records and physical resources, are integrated for different types of applications. Due to the sheer number of connected IoT devices, which generate a large amount of data, Distributed Ledger Technology, such as Blockchain and IOTA have been recently applied in developing access control models, yet they involve significant energy due to mining, low throughput, non-scalable, and computational overhead that is not acceptable for IoT resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose a Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control framework (SDAC) by using the IOTA platform. IOTA is an emerging distributed ledger technology that has significant features for IoT, such as zero fees transactions, scalability, security and energy efficiency. The proposed SDAC aims to improve security, authorize, and authenticate users when accessing data by using the IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) protocol. MAM ensures access control by encrypting and granting permission to only authorized users. The experimental results indicate that IOTA MAM is a feasible solution that can be used for managing authorization in the IoT domain.