Towards Blockchain-Based Identity and Access Management for Internet of Things in Enterprises

With the Internet of Things (IoT) evolving more and more, companies active within this area face new challenges for their Identity and Access Management (IAM). Namely, general security, resource constraint devices, interoperability, and scalability cannot be addressed anymore with traditional measures. Blockchain technology, however, may act as an enabler to overcome those challenges. In this paper, general application areas for blockchain in IAM are described based on recent research work. On this basis, it is discussed how blockchain can address IAM challenges presented by IoT. Finally, a corporate scenario utilizing blockchain-based IAM for IoT is outlined to assess the applicability in practice. The paper shows that private blockchains can be leveraged to design tamper-proof IAM functionality while maintaining scalability regarding the number of clients and transactions. This could be useful for enterprises to prevent single-point-of-failures as well as to enable transparent and secure auditing & monitoring of security-relevant events

Automated Ethereum Smart Contract for Block Chain Based Smart Home Security

© 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. Presence of Internet of Things (IoT) based applications has been increasing in various domains including transportation, logistics, health care, and smart homes. Such applications involve deploying an enormous number of IoT devices, which generally lacks from security and often associates several vulnerabilities. These IoT devices need to communicate and synchronize with each other, which also increase the security and privacy challenges. Traditional security models are based on centralized and often include complicated approaches which, tend to be inapplicable and have some limitations. Therefore, one proposed solution is to use blockchain technology which could provide decentralize, secure, and peer-to-peer networks. In this paper, private blockchain implementation using Ethereum smart contract is developed for the smart home to ensure only the home owner can access and monitor home appliances. Simple smart contracts are designed to allow devices to communicate without the need for trusted third party. Our prototype demonstrates three key elements of blockchain-based smart security solution for smart home applications such as smart contract, blockchain-based access control and performance evaluation of the proposed scheme

Exploiting Blockchain Technology for Attribute Management in Access Control Systems

Access Control systems are a key resource in computer security to properly manage the access to digital resources. Blockchain technology, instead, is a novel technology to decentralise the control and management of a shared state, representing anything from a data repository to a distributed virtual machine. We propose to integrate traditional Access Control systems with blockchain technology to allow the combined system to inherit the desirable properties blockchain technology provides, mainly transparency and, consequently, auditability. Depending on the application scenario considered, for some systems it may not be desirable to employ a fully decentralised approach. As such, in this paper we outline how our proposal can be adapted to allow for the minimal possible integration of blockchain technology in a traditional Access Control system. In particular, we consider the scenario where Attribute Managers only may be managed on chain through smart contracts. We provide a proof of concept implementation based on Ethereum, and show its performance through experimental results