# A Lightweight Blockchain-Based IoT Identity Management Approach
###### Abstract  
Identity management is a fundamental feature of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, particularly for IoT data access control. However, most of the actual works adopt centralized approaches, which could lead to a single point of failure and privacy issues that are tied to the use of a trusted third parties. A consortium blockchain is an emerging technology that provides a neutral and trustable computation and storage platform that is suitable for building identity management solutions for IoT. This paper proposes a lightweight architecture and the associated protocols for consortium blockchain-based identity management to address privacy, security, and scalability issues in a centralized system for IoT. Besides, we implement a proof-of-concept prototype and evaluate our approach. We evaluate our work by measuring the latency and throughput of the transactions while using different query actions and payload sizes, and we compared it to other similar works. The results show that the approach is suitable for business adoption.  
identity management; blockchain; internet of things; distributed ledger technology; sensor; access control +
Footnote †: journal:  
0000-0001-9991-  
Integrating blockchain technology with identity management will be the solution for some prevalent issues, such as centralized governing of identities, which also leads to some security and availability issues, such as a single point of access and single point failure. Moreover, blockchain will eliminate the need for trusted third parties to perform checks on identities as the blockchain ledger is distributed across the consortium participants. The clients will have control over their personal information, as the data in BC are immutable, encrypted, and cannot be deleted. Many industry leaders are keen to adopt blockchain in order to enhance the privacy and security of their identity management infrastructure and to change their traditional business model or to build the economy of sharing concept. Despite this, the blockchain is not adequate for all businesses, and any unstructured or inadequate ready to use solution may lead to failure due to shifting the business strategy for centralizing to the decentralized concept.  
The paper contribution is to propose a lightweight blockchain-based IoT identity management approach. First, we present our work architecture describing blockchain-based identity management and the associated protocol of registration, verification, and revocation. Our protocol addresses privacy and security issues in traditional centralized systems, and spotlights the concept of distributing the authority of an identity system to a group of organizations. Furthermore, we implement the proof-of-concept prototype and evaluate the approach of splitting the main functionalities of an identity management system to separated immutable ledgers and discussed the results. Finally, we give a detailed related work comparison and present our future research directions.  
The remainder of this paper is organized, as follows. Section 2 discusses the related work. Section 3 presents the proposed blockchain-based identity management approach.Section 4 introduces the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype. Section 5 presents and discusses the evaluation of used approach and conducts a detailed comparison with related work. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and highlights the future work.