Interledger Smart Contracts for Decentralized Authorization to Constrained Things
This addresses authorization challenges for IoT systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing smart contract and blockchain technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of decentralized authorization for constrained IoT devices by proposing models that use smart contracts and interledger mechanisms, resulting in evaluations on Ethereum testnets showing tradeoffs in cost, delay, and data reduction.
We present models that utilize smart contracts and interledger mechanisms to provide decentralized authorization for constrained IoT devices. The models involve different tradeoffs in terms of cost, delay, complexity, and privacy, while exploiting key advantages of smart contracts and multiple blockchains that communicate with interledger mechanisms. These include immutably recording hashes of authorization information and policies in smart contracts, resilience through the execution of smart contract code on all blockchain nodes, and cryptographically linking transactions and IoT events recorded on different blockchains using hash and time-lock mechanisms. The proposed models are evaluated on the public Ethereum testnets Rinkeby and Ropsten, in terms of execution cost (gas), delay, and reduction of data that needs to be sent to the constrained IoT devices.