AAC-IoT: Attribute Access Control Scheme for IoT Using Lightweight Cryptography and Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated environment as it merges physical smart objects to the Internet via wireless technologies to share data. The global connectivity of IoT devices brings the needs to ensure security and privacy for data owners and data users. In this paper, an attribute-based access control scheme for IoT (AAC-IoT) using Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) blockchain is proposed to address the security challenges. In the AAC-IoT scheme, data owners are registered and authenticated using identities, certificates and signatures. Data users, however, are registered with identities, certificates, signatures and physical unclonable function (PUF); then a credence score is computed for users to predict the originality during authentication. For access control, attribute-based access control (ABAC) is used, and the number of attributes is selected based on the sensitivity of the data. In accordance with the attributes count, the access control policies are generated. The novel concept of attribute count is determined from a fuzzy logic method using data type and preference. Hyperledger Fabric (HLB) blockchain is presented to manage meta-data and security credentials from data owners and data users, respectively, using a lightweight hashing algorithm. The AAC-IoT model using HLF blockchain is developed with Java programming language and iFogSim simulator. The performance metrics are measured based on latency, throughput and storage overhead, and the results show better outcome than the previous research work.