DHACS: Smart Contract-based Decentralized Hybrid Access Control for Industrial Internet of Things

In the present work, we propose DHACS, a Decentralized Hybrid Access Control for Smart contract, for IIoTs. DHACS aims to provide transparency, reliability and robustness to the existing access control mechanism in IIoTs. The framework is based on blockchain feasibilities that contributes with an interconnected hybrid access control through smart contract provision which is new in the domain. We use three access control strategies: role-based, rule-based, and organization-based to develop a hybrid approach for smart contract. The operational transactions along with their accesses controls are accounted and blocks are made by transaction pooler and block creator. We use a private blockchain environment; however, it can be extended to a public blockchain or consortium blockchain for geographical distributed dependency. We compare DHACS with three existing approaches in recent time. We measure the performance in terms of computational costs, storage complexity and energy consumption. DHACS outperforms the others approaches and is considered to be efficient for IIoT applications with more than 30% better efficiency in access control management. To the best of our knowledge, DHACS is the first attempt to use decentralized blockchains with smart contract for hybrid access control in IIoTs.