A Blockchain-empowered Access Control Framework for Smart Devices in Green Internet of Things

Green Internet of things (GIoT) generally refers to a new generation of Internet of things design concept. It can save energy and reduce emissions, reduce environmental pollution, waste of resources, and harm to human body and environment, in which green smart device (GSD) is a basic unit of GIoT for saving energy. With the access of a large number of heterogeneous bottom-layer GSDs in GIoT, user access and control of GSDs have become more and more complicated. Since there is no unified GSD management system, users need to operate different GIoT applications and access different GIoT cloud platforms when accessing and controlling these heterogeneous GSDs. This fragmented GSD management model not only increases the complexity of user access and control for heterogeneous GSDs, but also reduces the scalability of GSDs applications. To address this issue, this article presents a blockchain-empowered general GSD access control framework, which provides users with a unified GSD management platform. First, based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) decentralized identifiers (DIDs) standard, users and GSD are issued visual identity (VID). Then, we extended the GSD-DIDs protocol to authenticate devices and users. Finally, based on the characteristics of decentralization and non-tampering of blockchain, a unified access control system for GSD was designed, including the registration, granting, and revoking of access rights. We implement and test on the Raspberry Pi device and the FISCO-BCOS alliance chain. The experimental results prove that the framework provides a unified and feasible way for users to achieve decentralized, lightweight, and fine-grained access control of GSDs. The solution reduces the complexity of accessing and controlling GSDs, enhances the scalability of GSD applications, as well as guarantees the credibility and immutability of permission data and identity data during access.