Effective IoT authentication and authorisation using blockchain
Creators: name: Khizar,
Publisher: name: University of Tasmania
Year: 2024

description: Nowadays, internet usage and its importance in human lives for performing many ordinary tasks are growing at a rapid pace and on a huge scale, resulting in the emergence of a ubiquitous network known as the Internet of Things (IoT). An IoT technology advances as a result of continuous development of its underlying architecture, network-supported technologies, communication and topological protocols, and the proliferation of included smart devices equipped with actuators, sensors, and a multitude of software capabilities that enable these large numbers of smart devices to connect and communicate over the internet in order to capture, process, and transmit data across the network. The advancements in IoT technology and the rapid adoption of various standard and non-standard IoT devices have resulted in the development of numerous modern applications such as smart homes, smart health, smart city, and smart transportation that provide services in every aspect of humans to improve their quality of life. However, as these applications use heterogeneous and non-standard IoT devices, the security of the IoT network has become a significant concern. Furthermore, the attackers are constantly looking for new methods or ways to exploit the IoT network in terms of deployed devices, protocols and services, whether by forging existing device identities or deploying new malicious devices within the network. Thus, authentication and authorisation are two key security requirements for securing IoT devices, as they restrict attackers' ability to access critical resources in IoT networks through the use of appropriate authentication and authorisation solutions.Conventional authentication and authorisation solutions for IoT networks to achieve the security of IoT devices encountered a number of challenges, including centralised architecture, scalability issues, untrusted servers, data inconsistency, malicious tampering, and the use of expensive cryptographic primitives. To address these challenges, the recent trend of integrating Blockchain technology with IoT networks has resulted in the design of decentralised authentication and authorisation solutions that protect IoT devices while also achieving a number of desirable features, including decentralisation architecture, distributed immutable ledger, consensus mechanism, accountability, and transparency. However, integrating Blockchain technology and IoT to develop security solutions is not a simple process, as the two technologies are intrinsically different and pose different challenges. While researchers and academia have made significant efforts to develop authentication and authorisation solutions for IoT networks using Blockchain technology, these existing solutions face a number of challenges related to performance overheads, storage inefficiency, security and privacy, as well as flexibility and dynamicity. Thus, the challenges associated with integrating Blockchain technology with IoT networks while designing decentralised, efficient, secure, flexible, and dynamic authentication and authorisation solutions need to be investigated.In this thesis, Blockchain technology is leveraged to design a decentralised authentication scheme for IoT networks that efficiently authenticate IoT devices, requiring only the minimum amount of storage, communication, and computation overhead. The clone node attack detection scheme is also designed to detect the malicious behaviour of pre-authenticated IoT devices that compromise the device authentication process in the network. Furthermore, the decentralised, secure, flexible and dynamic authorisation scheme is designed to securely authorise the users accessing the IoT network resources using Blockchain technology. In summary, the following concrete contributions are made by this thesis:Comprehensive and state-of-the-art survey of Blockchain-based IoT applications, focusing on potential application design, security and privacy requirements that aid in the design of secure and efficient solutions for IoT-based networks and further discussed attacks and their potential countermeasures.Decentralised Blockchain-based authentication scheme for IoT networks aimed to achieve a secure and efficient authentication process for IoT devices using the token mechanism, focusing on the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices integrating with Blockchain technology.Clone node attack detection scheme for mobile IoT networks by leveraging the concept of context-aware and location-proof systems to detect the clone nodes in a dynamic environment with a high detection rate and maximum efficiency.Model, analyse and verify the proposed clone node attack detection scheme for IoT networks to evaluate its logical and functional correctness and guarantee system freeness from problematic scenarios or anomalies while deploying in real-time scenarios.Decentralised and secure Blockchain-based authorisation scheme for IoT networks with the utilisation of attribute-based access control (ABAC) fine-grained policies to handle the dynamic nature of IoT devices and the enhancement of auditable features of users' requests assigned policies.<br>