A Distributed Blockchain-based Access Control for the Internet of Things
Ebtihal Abdulrahman, Suhair Alshehri, Ali Alzubaidy, Asma Cherif
TL;DR
This work addresses the need for scalable, privacy-preserving access control in the IoT by proposing DBC-ABAC, a distributed blockchain based ABAC model implemented on Hyperledger Fabric. It decentralizes ABAC components via smart contracts, uses edge computing to bring decisions closer to data producers, and stores data off-chain in a distributed storage system to reduce blockchain load. The approach demonstrates improved latency and throughput relative to selected baselines and enables dynamic policy management with delegation and revocation. The study provides a practical blueprint for integrating ABAC with a permissioned blockchain in IoT contexts, with demonstrated performance benefits and a clear path toward production deployment, though it notes current limitations such as single-machine evaluation and scope restrictions for consensus and data storage integrations.
Abstract
Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) environment has become increasingly fertile for malicious users to break the security and privacy of IoT users. Access control is a paramount necessity to forestall illicit access. Traditional access control mechanisms are designed and managed in a centralized manner, thus rendering them unfit for decentralized IoT systems. To address the distributed IoT environment, blockchain is viewed as a promising decentralised data management technology. In this thesis, we investigate the state-of-art works in the domain of distributed blockchain-based access control. We establish the most important requirements and assess related works against them. We propose a Distributed Blockchain and Attribute-based Access Control model for IoT entitled (DBC-ABAC) that merges blockchain technology with the attribute-based access control model. A proof-of-concept implementation is presented using Hyperledger Fabric. To validate performance, we experimentally evaluate and compare our work with other recent works using Hyperledger Caliper tool. Results indicate that the proposed model surpasses other works in terms of latency and throughput with considerable efficiency.