Ontological-based ABAC and Blockchain Organizational Cooperation Framework for Security Management in AmI environments

IoT paradigm raises several critical challenges that are still difficult to achieve, such as message-integrity checking, authentication, and the lack of security. Blockchain as an emerging technology provides secure communication architecture. Moreover, relying on Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model-based smart contract realizes a trans-organizational access control. Creating these Blockchain-based IoT applications raises challenging tasks, mainly related to knowledge exchange between various artifacts and humans. Since ontology facilitates the exchange of knowledge between users and systems and between the systems themselves, it constitutes de facto an ineluctable design to tackle the semantic interoperability issues by providing a unified representation of knowledge and sharing a common understanding of the semantic context structure. Thereby, using the ABAC mechanism and Blockchain paradigm with an ontological model promotes semantic contextual knowledge inferences and facilitates autonomous decision making without the intervention of a trusted third party, which could easily collect valuable private information unbeknownst to the users.