Trust Management in Decentralized IoT Access Control System
This addresses the need for lightweight and scalable access control in heterogeneous IoT environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain-based proposals.
The paper tackles the problem of dynamic interactions in IoT access control by developing a blockchain-based Trust and Reputation System (TRS) that calculates trust scores for nodes, resulting in a self-adaptive system with dynamic access control policies, implemented and benchmarked in a private Ethereum blockchain.
Heterogeneous and dynamic IoT environments require a lightweight, scalable, and trustworthy access control system for protection from unauthorized access and for automated detection of compromised nodes. Recent proposals in IoT access control systems have incorporated blockchain to overcome inherent issues in conventional access control schemes. However, the dynamic interaction of IoT networks remains uncaptured. Here, we develop a blockchain based Trust and Reputation System (TRS) for IoT access control, which progressively evaluates and calculates the trust and reputation score of each participating node to achieve a self-adaptive and trustworthy access control system. Trust and reputation are explicitly incorporated in the attribute-based access control policy, so that different nodes can be assigned to different access right levels, resulting in dynamic access control policies. We implement our proposed architecture in a private Ethereum blockchain comprised of a Docker container network. We benchmark our solution using various performance metrics to highlight its applicability for IoT contexts.