LBAC: A lightweight blockchain-based access control scheme for the internet of things

Abstract Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is considered to be one of the most suitable schemes for cryptographic access control in the big data environment. But it still faces many challenges to be applied in the Internet of Things (IoT). ABE is implemented based on bilinear pairing, which is considered to be an expensive operation. However, there are lots of IoT devices with constrained resources. Proxy re-encryption methods based on the cloud are proposed to reduce computing overhead on the user side, but an untrusted cloud may give incorrect computing results to mislead users. To solve this problem, an access control scheme with lightweight decryption based on ABE and blockchain technologies is proposed. We assume that the cloud is untrusted, and guarantee the accuracy of proxy re-encryption calculation based on blockchain. In addition, how to encourage users to obtain authorization through blockchain and record access behavior on the blockchain is a problem worthy of attention. This paper proposes a user credibility incentive mechanism, which calculates the user’s credibility according to the user’s access behavior and gives a reputation score, so as to dynamically adjust the endorsement protocol. Security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed method is reliable and efficient.