Multi-tenant, Decentralized Access Control for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) involves diverse devices exchanging data and impacting the real world through actuators, often unattended. IoT data and actuation are accessed by many and diverse stakeholders, emphasizing the need for security and privacy and in particular for effective, efficient, usable, and fine-grained access control solutions. Unfortunately, most of the conventional access control approaches have been proven inefficient or ineffective for the IoT. Novel access control mechanisms have been designed, specifically for the IoT, with some of them taking advantage of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). DLTs and smart contracts provide increased availability, automation, transparency, and decentralization. Here, we first review the related literature and then we develop IoT access control requirements and solutions. We argue that DLT-based access control systems can address the key requirements for the IoT and we validate this claim by designing a realistic access control solution for a smart city use case.