A Review of Blockchain-Based Access Control for the Industrial IoT

Abstract

The rapid development and wide application of industrial Internet of things (IoT) have made network security issues such as identity authentication, access control, and data privacy more and more important in the distributed network environment, while blockchain technology benefiting from the advantages of decentralization, high confidence, and difficulty tampering are able to solve the trust problem existing in traditional access control technology. In this paper, firstly the basic concepts of access control and blockchain are explained, and the existing access control model and method based on blockchain in the industrial IoT scenario are summarized. Next, according to different implementation methods of blockchain, two technical routes are innovatively divided, i.e., the blockchain acts as a trusted entity (combination blockchain mode) in combination with the traditional access control technology, and the access control model constructed by completely utilizing the brand-new mode (full blockchain mode) of the distributed and non-tampering characteristics of the blockchain. From the angle of these two technical routes, the unique advantages of applying the blockchain to the IoT access control field are analyzed. Then, according to the key issues in the application of blockchain, the current research progress is summarized from the aspects of dynamic access control, space optimization on the chain, privacy data protection, etc. Finally, the further research direction is provided combined with the current challenges of access control mechanism based on industrial IoT.