IOTA-Based Access Control Framework for the Internet of Things

With the rapid dissemination of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of resources deployed in IoT systems such as devices and data is growing explosively. Since IoT systems often handle private information, it is essential to enforce appropriate access control to prevent unauthorized access. However, conventional access control schemes in which access rights are stored in a centralized server are prone to load concentration and a single point of failure. Although distributed access control schemes leveraging blockchain technologies have been proposed to deal with such problems, they inherit the drawbacks of the blockchain technologies, such as high transaction fee and low throughput. This paper proposes a novel access control framework based on IOTA, an emerging distributed ledger technology which enables free micro transactions with high throughput. This framework provides scalable and fine-grained access control by encrypting access rights using the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology and storing them on the distributed ledger of IOTA, called Tangle.