Architecture

Access control

Maturity (psychological)

Distributed computing

The Internet

Variety (cybernetics)

World Wide Web

Visual arts

Developmental psychology

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Blockchain

Computer science

Computer security

Scalability

Database

Internet of Things

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

The Internet of Things (IoT) is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity and establishing itself as a part of the future Internet. One of the technical challenges of having billions of devices deployed worldwide is the ability to manage them. Although access management technologies exist in IoT, they are based on centralized models which introduce a new variety of technical limitations to manage them globally. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for arbitrating roles and permissions in IoT. The new architecture is a fully distributed access control system for IoT based on blockchain technology. The architecture is backed by a proof of concept implementation and evaluated in realistic IoT scenarios. The results show that the blockchain technology could be used as access management technology in specific scalable IoT scenarios.

Blockchain Meets IoT: An Architecture for Scalable Access Management in IoT