DTSAC: Smart Contract-based Access Control with Delegation and Trust Management

Abstract

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), access control has become particularly important in protecting data security. However, traditional access control models have limited capabilities in addressing challenges such as single points of failure, coarse-grained access control, and insufficient security in distributed environments. To tackle these challenges, we propose DTSAC, a smart contract-based access control with distributed delegation and dynamic trust management. This model utilizes blockchain for the decentralized delegation of capabilities and distributes delegation relationships across multiple delegation trees to enable fast revocation of capabilities. In addition, we design a dynamic trust assessment mechanism between the delegator and the delegatee to more comprehensively evaluate the credibility of the subject. Finally, a functional prototype of the DTSAC is successfully deployed on the public Sepolia Ethereum testnet. The experimental evaluation is conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model.