Rethinking Blockchain for Access Control in the Internet of Things

IoT is a network of interconnected heterogeneous devices which sense, accumulate the data and forward the same to the cloud platform for analytical purposes. There are various IoT verticals in which huge research is going on. IoT security is the most challenging research area in which researchers are investing a huge number of efforts. The challenges in IoT security include access control, trust management, authentication, authorization, privacy, and secured device to device communication. To overcome these, this paper gives an overview of proposed trust based distributed access control approach in IoT. Some of the challenges and threats can be controlled by blockchain technology. Basically, blockchain is an open and distributed ledger of records that can be verified efficiently and stored permanently. This paper checks the feasibility study of the applicability of blockchain in the IoT ecosystem to apply access control mechanism and privacy-preserving policies. This paper discusses how access control and privacy can be addressed by blockchain without compromising security. This paper consists of rigorous gap analysis which is done on the top of comprehensive literature survey. The paper also addresses the challenges and issues which can be faced while applying access control mechanism using blockchain in the context of IoT.