A lightweight access control scheme based on blockchain and ABE for the IoT

The exponential increase of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has significantly increased the demand for data sharing, and access control is a fundamental requirement for secure data sharing. In response to this need, scholars have designed many Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) access control schemes. However, these schemes fail to account for the resource constraints and dynamic nature of IoT devices, making it difficult to handle complex computations and increasing security risks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel terminal-edge-blockchain architecture that enables lightweight access control for IoT devices. Building on traditional static attribute access control, we incorporate dynamic attribute verification and hide access policies to enhance the security of data sharing. Specifically, we abandon the expensive bilinear pairing operation and adopt the elliptic curve encryption algorithm to achieve lightweight fine-grained attribute-based encryption access control, and improve sharing efficiency through caching and precomputation. Finally, we conduct comprehensive security analysis and experimental evaluations. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers both robust security and high efficiency.