An Approach for Blockchain and Symmetric Keys Broadcast Encryption Based Access Control in IoT

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of data access control when the subscribers are IoT devices with initialization that cannot be updated during the entire life cycle. A generic framework and a particular instance for conditional data access control within IoT are proposed. The generic framework is based on the employment of a dedicated secret key-based broadcast encryption scheme where encrypted credentials for conditional data access is available in the blockchain and encrypted data subject to conditional access are available in an off-chain source of streaming data. Reduction of the keys management overhead in comparison with a straightforward decryption keys delivery is experimentally illustrated. An instance of the proposed framework built over the Ethereum blockchain platform is developed and experimentally evaluated.