Combining IOTA and Attribute-Based Encryption for Access Control in the Internet of Things

Unauthorized resource access represents a typical security threat in the Internet of things (IoT), while distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and IOTA) hold great promise to address this threat. Although blockchain-based IoT access control schemes have been the most popular ones, they suffer from several significant limitations, such as high monetary cost and low throughput of processing access requests. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel IoT access control scheme by combining the fee-less IOTA technology and the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology. To control the access to a resource, a token, which records access permissions to this resource, is encrypted by the CP-ABE technology and uploaded to the IOTA Tangle (i.e., the underlying database of IOTA). Any user can fetch the encrypted token from the Tangle, while only those who can decrypt this token are authorized to access the resource. In this way, the proposed scheme enables not only distributed, fee-less and scalable access control thanks to the IOTA but also fine-grained attribute-based access control thanks to the CP-ABE. We show the feasibility of our scheme by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype system using smart phones (Google Pixel 3XL) and a commercial IoT gateway (NEC EGW001). We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of access request processing throughput. The experimental results show that our scheme enables object owners to authorize access rights to a large number of subjects in a much (about 5 times) shorter time than the existing access control scheme called Decentralized Capability-based Access Control framework using IOTA (DCACI), significantly improving the access request processing throughput.