Data Sharing System Integrating Access Control Mechanism using Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts for IoT Devices

In this paper, a blockchain-based data sharing and access control system is proposed, for communication between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The proposed system is intended to overcome the issues related to trust and authentication for access control in IoT networks. Moreover, the objectives of the system are to achieve trustfulness, authorization, and authentication for data sharing in IoT networks. Multiple smart contracts such as Access Control Contract (ACC), Register Contract (RC), and Judge Contract (JC) are used to provide efficient access control management. Where ACC manages overall access control of the system, and RC is used to authenticate users in the system, JC implements the behavior judging method for detecting misbehavior of a subject (i.e., user). After the misbehavior detection, a penalty is defined for that subject. Several permission levels are set for IoT devices’ users to share services with others. In the end, performance of the proposed system is analyzed by calculating cost consumption rate of smart contracts and their functions. A comparison is made between existing and proposed systems. Results show that the proposed system is efficient in terms of cost. The overall execution cost of the system is 6,900,000 gas units and the transaction cost is 5,200,000 gas units.