Enabling Attribute Revocation for Fine-Grained Access Control in Blockchain-IoT Systems

The attribute-based encryption (ABE) has drawn a lot of attention for fine-grained access control in blockchains, especially in blockchain-enabled tampering-resistant Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. However, its adoption has been severely hindered by the incompatibility between the immutability of typical blockchains and the attribute updates/revocations of ABE. In this article, we propose a new blockchain-based IoT system, which is compatible with the ABE technique, and fine-grained access control is implemented with the attribute update enabled by integrating Chameleon Hash algorithms into the blockchains. We design and implement a new verification scheme over a multilayer blockchain architecture to guarantee the tamper resistance against malicious and abusive tampering. The system can provide an update-oriented access control, where historical on-chain data can only be accessible to new members and inaccessible to the revoked members. This is distinctively different from existing solutions, which are threatened by data leakage toward the revoked members. We also provide analysis and simulations showing that our system outperforms other solutions in terms of overhead, searching complexity, security, and compatibility.

I. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is reshaping manufacturing and industrial processes [1]. Massive data from smart machines can reduce cost, benefit production, and assist in deriving accurate business decisions and have attracted increasing attention. The massive data need to be accessible by specific groups of users among many different entities. Fine-grained access control is important, especially with the fast development of the IoT and the increasing number of devices and users [2], [3]. Existing solutions tend to rely on the cloud service to maintain data storage for access control services [4]. However, there exist the following critical issues. 1)

Amazon Cloud Service, Microsoft Azure, and Alicloud suffered from the service outage from 2017 to 2019, leading to the huge losses of data service for customers [5]–[7].

2)

The public cloud, the private cloud, and the hybrid cloud hardly tolerate the Byzantine Failure  [8]. The Byzantine Failure takes malicious nodes into account, which is the most complicated failure mode in a distributed system [9].

3)

The cloud services lack trustworthy tamper resistance for data storage and access control [10].