Blockchain-Based Administration of Access in Smart Home IoT

Abstract

There is a rising concern about authorization in IoT environments to be appropriately designed and applied, due to smart things surge to be part of people's daily lives on one hand, and the amount of personal/private information they utilize, on the other hand. Different access control systems have been proposed for different IoT environments, many are remaining only at a conceptual level. In this paper, we propose a decentralized, ledger-based, publish-subscribe based architecture for the administration of access in a smart home IoT environment to preside at the assignments of underlying operational authorizations. Proposed architecture is endorsed by a proof-of-concept implementation, which utilizes smart contracts to ensure the integrity of administration supplemented by intrinsic benefits of blockchain to be distributed and transparent. Despite the rising hype around the blockchain technology that stokes its utilization in different domains, utilizing it for access control purposes is not yet promising. Our implementation results assure using blockchain for administrative access control is propitious, while is not yet appropriate for operational access control, which have been mainly the focus of previously proposed blockchain-based access control works.