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

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Unauthorized resource access is a major security challenge in the Internet of Things (IoT).
• Existing blockchain-based IoT access control methods face limitations like high costs and low processing throughput.
• Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) like IOTA offer potential solutions for IoT security.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel IoT access control scheme addressing limitations of current systems.
• To combine the fee-less IOTA technology with Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) for enhanced security.
• To achieve distributed, scalable, and fine-grained access control in IoT environments.

Main Methods:

• Developed a new IoT access control scheme integrating IOTA and CP-ABE.
• Utilized CP-ABE to encrypt access permission tokens, storing them on the IOTA Tangle.
• Implemented a proof-of-concept prototype using smartphones and an IoT gateway.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme enables distributed, fee-less, and scalable access control.
• Achieved fine-grained, attribute-based access control through CP-ABE.
• Experimental results demonstrated a significant improvement (approximately 5 times faster) in access request processing throughput compared to the DCACI scheme.

Conclusions:

• The novel IOTA and CP-ABE based scheme effectively enhances IoT access control security and performance.
• The system offers a practical solution for managing access rights in IoT networks.
• The proposed approach significantly boosts access request processing throughput, outperforming existing methods.