A novel Paradigm for Access Control Trust in IoT Applications: A Distributed Cross-Communication Approach

How to best secure communications between IoT devices remains a challenging research area. However, the heterodox nature of individual IoT devices and its limited capabilities demand a more centralized, authority-derivative nature of SSL/TLS for the IoT ecosystem. While a number of experimental protocols have been proposed, many of these techniques are either derivative of SSL/TLS on some layer, or lack either enough ubiquity to be widely applied to a live ecosystem, or verifiable results. This paper proposes a distributed system for securing end-to-end cross-device communications; Access Control Trust A Distributed Cross-Communication scheme (ACT-DCC) using a localized web of self-determinate nodes in a network. As opposed to distributed systems, which typically rely on blockchain or centrally signed certificates, the proposed scheme instead operates on an iterative, decentralized method, which combines pathfinding techniques alongside an algorithmic interpretation of hash-chaining and ledger-based storage. An initial network device carries an original key, which is naturally spread to additional connected devices on the same network in a distributed, web-like fashion. As more devices join the distributed network, the strength of the network grows exponentially through the volume of edge devices available in the web. The proposed scheme shows significant improvement as compared to other cross-device communication schemes, and encourages better-individualized decentralization, and less locally stored data.