A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework

Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things

Tariq Alsboui

, Muhammad Hussain

, Hussain Al-Aqrabi

, Richard Hill

and Mohammad Hijjawi

University of Huddersﬁeld, U.K.

Higher Colleges of Technology, U.A.E.

Applied Science Private University, Jordan

Keywords:

Internet of Things (IoT), Access Control, IOTA Tangle, Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM), Restricted

Mode.

Abstract:

With the vast development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem, various types of information, such as health-

care records and physical resources, are integrated for different types of applications. Due to the sheer number

of connected IoT devices, which generate a large amount of data, Distributed Ledger Technology, such as

Blockchain and IOTA have been recently applied in developing access control models, yet they involve signif-

icant energy due to mining, low throughput, non-scalable, and computational overhead that is not acceptable

for IoT resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose a Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight

Access Control framework (SDAC) by using the IOTA platform. IOTA is an emerging distributed ledger

technology that has signiﬁcant features for IoT, such as zero fees transactions, scalability, security and energy

efﬁciency. The proposed SDAC aims to improve security, authorize, and authenticate users when accessing

data by using the IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) protocol. MAM ensures access control

by encrypting and granting permission to only authorized users. The experimental results indicate that IOTA

MAM is a feasible solution that can be used for managing authorization in the IoT domain.

1 INTRODUCTION

Over the last few years, various branches of Artiﬁ-

cial Intelligence, have been widely adopted for deliv-

ering services across numerous domains, from indus-

trial defect detection (Hussain et al., 2022c), health-

care (Hussain et al., 2022d) renewable energy (Hus-

sain et al., 2022a), intelligent transportation (Perera

et al., 2017; Sumalee and Ho, 2018) and preserva-

tion of food quality (Hussain et al., 2022b). Inter-

net of Things (IoT) interconnects heterogeneous de-

vices with diverse functionalities to meet the evolving

requirements of the earlier mentioned domains (Al-

Fuqaha et al., 2015). IoT devices are characterised by

limited resources, such as power consumption, mem-

ory and processing (Alsboui et al., 2021a). Research

reports estimate the rapid growth of IoT; in the or-

der of 125 billion devices connected to the Internet in

2030 (Cisco, 2016; Gartner, 2013; Research, 2013).

Consequently, this presents many challenges with re-

gards to data that comes in greater volume, velocity

and variety, timely processing, privacy and scalabil-

ity (Al-Aqrabi et al., 2019; Alsboui et al., 2020).

IoT devices, in particular sensors are usually de-

ployed without careful security consideration. This

results in critical security issues. It has been reported

that one issue related to security is unauthorized ac-

cess to the IoT resources, which has been extensively

studied in (Neshenko et al., 2019). As IoT data con-

tains personal information and IoT devices equipped

with sensors are often deployed in close proximity to

human bodies, without providing an appropriate ac-

cess control mechanism to the IoT resources, our data

and safety would be signiﬁcantly threatened.

Authorization and access control are fundamen-

tal challenge determining the successful implemen-

tation of many IoT applications. Authorization can

be deﬁned as the process of enabling the right access

to authorized users. Access control is considered as

the backbone technology to ensure information secu-

rity. It provides the opportunities to overcome some

of the IoT technical challenges. It can be deﬁned as

a technique that restricts access to resources (i.e., ob-

jects) to only the authorized users (i.e., subjects). Ac-

cess control will ultimately monitor the access of re-

sources and prevent the unauthorized ﬂow of informa-

178

Alsboui, T., Hussain, M., Al-Aqrabi, H., Hill, R. and Hijjawi, M.

A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things.

DOI: 10.5220/0011963600003482

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security (IoTBDS 2023), pages 178-185

ISBN: 978-989-758-643-9; ISSN: 2184-4976

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

tion. However, traditional access control methods and

techniques cannot fully solve the access control prob-

lems faced by the IoT due to centralization, which

represents a single point of failure (Qiu et al., 2020).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is an

emerging development that shares data among dif-

ferent participants deployed over various locations all

over the world. This technology provides several ben-

eﬁts to various IoT applications. Literature reveals

a growing interest of relevant research community in

DLT, considering it one possible solution to address

some of the IoT related challenges, such as scalability,

access control, security and privacy. (Alsboui et al.,

2020; Fan et al., 2019).

Most recently, IOTA technology, a paradigm shift,

is changing the infrastructure for the major applica-

tion areas of IoT by enabling a decentralized envi-

ronment with anonymous and trustful transactions.

The combination of IoT and IOTA technology brings

many beneﬁts including less operational cost, decen-

tralized resource management, scalability, and robust-

ness against attacks. This indicates that the conver-

gence of IoT and IOTA technology will ultimately

overcome the signiﬁcant challenges identiﬁed in the

IoT domain.

In this paper, we propose a Scalable Decentralized

and Lightweight Access Control framework by using

the IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM)

(See Section 2 for Further Details) as a suitable so-

lution to tackle the scalability, and authorization is-

sues for IoT applications. MAM is a second layer

data communication protocol that is used to authenti-

cate, and encrypt data streams via the use of a set of

operations, such as public, private, and restricted.

Contributions. In this paper, we propose a system

architecture for IoT, called Scalable Decentralized

and Lightweight Access Control framework (SDAC).

This framework addresses access control issues in

IoT, whilst supporting the popular proof-of-work

(PoW) mechanism in an energy-efﬁcient way. The

key contributions can be summarized as follows:

• A Scalable decentralized and lightweight access

control framework that ensures scalability and ef-

ﬁciency in authorizing access to data by using the

IOTA MAM protocol with a set of operations.

• Evaluation of an existing Proof of Work (PoW)

ofﬂoading mechanism for efﬁcacy with regard to

energy efﬁciency and transaction throughput.

• Preliminary experimental results to verify the ef-

fectiveness and scalability of the proposed frame-

work.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Sec-

tion 2 presents an overview of the IOTA platform

and a detailed description of the masked authenticated

messaging. Section 3 presents the recent research

efforts in access control models in the IoT domain.

In Section 4, we describe our scalable decentralized

and lightweight access control framework. Section 5

presents an implementation of the proposed frame-

work and analysis of the results. Finally, in Section

6, we conclude the paper and discuss future work.

2 IOTA PLATFORM: AN

OVERVIEW

Currently, IOTA is scheduled to undergo a two-part

protocol upgrade, IOTA 1.5 (Chrysalis), which is the

current network and IOTA 2.0 (Coordicide), aimed

at implementing a series of major DLT technology

advancements to improve network functionality and

achieve greater decentralization. The IOTA 1.5 in-

troduces a protocol enhancements that enable smart

contract functionality, tokenized assets and stable

coins, which could enable new use cases for consumer

and enterprise IoT applications, an implementation

of product features including: reusable addresses,

UTXO, new Fireﬂy wallet, and new libraries and Ap-

plication Programming Interface (APIs) for an im-

proved developer experience. The IOTA 2.0, imple-

ments a new consensus mechanism that aims to im-

prove IOTA’s scalability, security, and decentraliza-

tion by removing the centralized Coordinator node.

The architecture of the IOTA tangle is an evolv-

ing DLT platform aimed at addressing transaction

costs, mining and scalability issues (in the context of

Blockchain technology) (Zhang and Jacobsen, 2018),

that are related to IoT. The architecture of a Tan-

gle (Serguei, 2017), which is central to IOTA, a DAG

that offers a potentially scalable IoT-enabled applica-

tions. Tangle can be used to build IoT applications.

However, tangle has the advantages of being intu-

itively understandable.

IOTA technology offers the necessary data access

authorization for IoT applications. In the context

of transactions, IOTA may promote IoT interactions.

This approach radically changes the overall design,

development, implementation and management pro-

cess of IoT systems.

2.1 The Tangle

The IOTA Tangle was developed to cope with the re-

quirements of IoT applications such as privacy, and

security. Tangle is built upon a Directed Acyclic

Graph (DAG), which is considered to be the ledger

that stores transactions. The Tangle is the data

A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things

179

structure that consists of a collection of sites and

edges (Serguei, 2017) as shown in Fig. 1. In or-

der to issue a transaction by a node, the node should

work to approve two previous transactions. Choos-

ing the two previous transactions is done by using

the tip selection technique whereby default is the

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique (Ser-

guei, 2017). Fig. 1 shows that the green boxes rep-

resent conﬁrmed transactions, while the red boxes are

unconﬁrmed transactions and the grey boxes repre-

sent tips without any validation. The main aim of the

Tangle network is to make all the transactions to be

conﬁrmed and to make all the unconﬁrmed transac-

tions to conﬁrmed transactions. The MCMC tech-

nique is executed n number of times Genesis is the

ﬁrst transaction of the network, which is approved di-

rectly or indirectly by the other transactions.

Figure 1: IOTA Tangle is based on a Directed Acyclic

Graph (DAG).

The IOTA Tangle is designed in a way to enable

transactional settlement to be more scalable, more the

transactions made more secure and efﬁcient the tangle

gets (Serguei, 2017).

2.2 Masked Authentication Messaging

IOTA developed a second layer data communication

protocol, called Masked Authenticating Messaging

(MAM) (Handy, 2017), which is responsible for

masking, authenticating, and encrypting data streams.

Consequently, data streams are broadcasted and re-

trieved through the Tangle as zero fee transactions.

Given these properties, MAM fulﬁlls an important

need in which integrity and access control are re-

quired.

Every MAM data transaction is linked with an ad-

dress in which a user can refer to the transaction. Data

transactions would be transmitted using the MAM

protocol at any point in time, but a small amount of

Proof of Work (PoW) is needed in order to broad-

cast data streams to the IOTA network. Transaction

data broadcasted using MAM are linked together in

chronological order. Furthermore, a signature of the

user is attached to all MAM data streams. This en-

sures that subscribers are required to verify the au-

thenticity of the user. By adopting MAM, users will

certainly ensure safety when exchanging data to the

Tangle.

MAM transactions can be broadcasted and fetched

from the IOTA Tangle, by communicating with a fully

functional node. This indicates that an IoT device will

be able to transmit encrypted data streams using the

IOTA MAM protocol.

2.2.1 MAM Privacy and Encryption Operations

MAM enables encryption to occur through several op-

erations including: public, private, and restricted. In

public operation, the user uses the tree’s root as the

address of the transaction that the message is pub-

lished to. A user will be able to decode it by using

the address of the message. Public operation enables

any user to read the content of the data, but it adds

immutability and data integrity.

In the case of private operation, there is an added

level of security that controls the access in order to

be able to read the content of the transaction data. It

enables access to users who have only the hash of the

channel key. The users would request the tangle for

the hash of the channel key. Then, it would enable

them to decode the transaction data by using the chan-

nel key.

Figure 2: The process of publishing transaction using re-

stricted operation.

In the case of restricted operation, it adds an au-

thorization key to the private operation. The address

used to attach to the network is the hash of the autho-

rization key and the Merkle root. It also offers granu-

lar access to users who have the secret key. Therefore,

access would be revoked from users if needed. If the

secret key change, the new authorized key is required

and should be distributed to the users that needs to

gain access to the data. Fig. 2 describes the process

of sending data using the restricted operation.

3 RELATED WORK

There has been sustained research into access control

models for IoT over the last few years. In a recent

IoTBDS 2023 - 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

180

publication (Ravidas et al., 2019), the authors classi-

ﬁed access control models into six categories includ-

ing: Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory

Access Control (MAC), Role-based Access Control

(RBAC), Organization-Based Access Control (Or-

BAC), Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC), and

Usage Control (UCON). For a comprehensive and re-

cent literature review, we refer the interested readers

to (Ravidas et al., 2019) and the references therein.

Such research efforts focused on developing access

control models for IoT. However, there has been little

attention on how to manage the scalable IoT infras-

tructure.

Recently, the authors in (Shafeeq et al., 2019) in-

troduced a new decentralized access control system

based on the Tangle. The system empowers the users

to dictate the access to their resource. The proposed

decentralized access control model allows the poli-

cies and access rights to be published on the Tan-

gle. Therefore, it guarantees distributed auditability

and prevents the user from fraudulently denying the

granted access rights. The proposed system is scal-

able, introduces low delays, and has zero transaction

fees. However, resource constraints of IoT devices

such as power consumption is not taken into consid-

eration.

In (Nakanishi et al., 2020), a novel access control

framework based on IOTA and the Ciphertext Policy

Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) CP-ABE tech-

nology is proposed. The framework works accord-

ing to three phases including: token structure, access

right authorization, and access right veriﬁcation. In

token structure, a token contains a unique ID, the is-

suer, the address it is linked with on the Tangle, the

policy that must be satisﬁed to decrypt the token, and

a list of access rights. In the authorization phase, the

object owner ﬁrst decides the policy embedded into

the token and the corresponding access rights to spec-

ify which group of subjects can perform what actions

to the object. Finally, the access right veriﬁcation Af-

ter successfully decrypting the token, a subject can

send the object owner an access request. The request

is also encrypted using CP-ABE and there is no need

to establish a secure communication channel between

the subject and the object owner. The proposed sys-

tem is scalable and has zero transaction fees. How-

ever, the system does not take into consideration the

limited energy consumption and computation of IoT

devices.

Similarly, an access control mechanism called,

Decentralized Capability-Based Access Control

framework (DCACI) is introduced in (Pinjala and

Sivalingam, 2019). The DCACI framework enables

complete privacy and integrity of the capability to-

kens using IOTA’s Masked Authenticated Messaging

(MAM) protocol. It enables device owners and

users to Grant, Update, Delegate and Revoke the

capability tokens. The proposed DCACI framework

is scalable, requires less delay, provides ﬁne-grained

access control mechanism for IoT networks and

has zero transaction fees. However, the framework

does not take into consideration the limited energy

consumption and computation of IoT devices.

Different from the above is the work proposed

in (Maesa et al., 2017) in which a new approach based

on blockchain technology to publish the policies ex-

pressing the right to access a resource and to allow the

distributed transfer of such right among users. The

proposed system uses the policies and the rights ex-

changes, which are publicly visible on the blockchain.

The proposed solution allows distributed auditabil-

ity, preventing a party from fraudulently denying the

rights granted by an enforceable policy. However,

the system lacks scalability and is not speciﬁcally de-

signed for constrained IoT devices.

In (Andersen et al., 2017) the authors propose

WAVE an authorization scheme based on Ethereum

Smart Contracts. Wave uses Delegations of Trust

(DoTs) and Identity-Based Encryption (IBE). The

DoTs together form a global permission graph which

spans different trust domains. A proof of authoriza-

tion is a chain of DoTs. WAVE enables the relevant

parties to look up such proofs of delegation efﬁciently.

The IBE allows a party to encrypt a message using

a global public key and the identity of the receiver

instead of that receiver’s public key. In order to de-

crypt, the receiver must be granted a secret key for

his identity by a global trusted entity. The Wave ap-

proach provides a powerful means of federating net-

works of embedded networks and supporting the life

cycles of devices, services, smart environments, in-

frastructures, and individuals. However, it lacks sup-

port for resource constrained IoT devices.

4 PROPOSED APPROACH

Fig. 3 presents an abstract view of the system archi-

tecture of the proposed Scalable Decentralized and

Lightweight Access Control Framework (SDAC). It

shows all relevant components including IoT devices,

transaction data ﬂow, Node JS with MAM, Gateway,

and PoW computation ofﬂoading server. The IoT de-

vices are mainly responsible for transmitting trans-

action data using MAM client and sends transaction

data to a receiver, which is the gateway. The gate-

way is connected to the internet and transmits transac-

tions data to a server, which runs the Node JS Masked

A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things

181

Authenticated Messaging (MAM) application. The

Node JS MAM is responsible for transmitting transac-

tion data to the IOTA Tangle. For example, the trans-

action data ﬂow from IoT devices (e.g., dash lines)

represents the way how transaction data is transmit-

ted to the IOTA Tangle using MAM.

Figure 3: The proposed scalable decentralized and

lightweight access control framework (SDAC).

The PoW enabled server is concerned with per-

forming heavy computation tasks on behalf of con-

strained IoT devices.

The ﬂowchart of the proposed SDAC framework

is shown in Fig. 4. First, the MAM state is initialized

using the main Tangle provider. After MAM state is

initialized, its patched with the Proof of Work (PoW)

for performing the PoW, which patches MAM sate

with the PoW Provider. Then, the channel mode is

set to restricted on the MAM state. Once this step

is completed, the payload is created and prepared to

be transferred to the main Tangle. Then, the PoW is

performed on the PoW provider. Once the PoW is

completed, the payload will be attached to the main

Tangle. In order for users to be able to access health-

care records, the root ID and the correct secret key

should be provided. Therefore, If the correct secret

key is provided, grant access to that user otherwise

deny access.

4.1 PoW Ofﬂoading

There are two types of ofﬂoading including: data of-

ﬂoading and computation ofﬂoading. Data ofﬂoad-

ing refers to the use of novel network techniques to

transmit mobile data originally planned for transfer-

ring via cellular networks, while computation ofﬂoad-

ing refers to ofﬂoading heavy computation tasks to re-

serve resources (Zheng et al., 2020). Fig. 5 illustrates

the PoW computation ofﬂoading mechanism used in

the SDAC framework. It shows how constrained IoT

Figure 4: Flowchart of the basic SDAC framework.

devices in terms of power are able to ofﬂoad the PoW

computation to a node with higher resources. The se-

lected node is an IOTA full node, which is responsible

for performing the PoW as described in Fig. 5.

Figure 5: PoW Computation Ofﬂoading in SDAC frame-

work.

5 IMPLEMENTATION, RESULTS

AND ANALYSIS

In this section, we report the preliminary experimen-

tal ﬁndings of our proposed SDAC framework, which

indicate its effectiveness in terms of access control,

IoTBDS 2023 - 8th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

182

authorization, and scalability for IoT healthcare ap-

plication. Furthermore, we provide analysis and dis-

cussion of the results

5.1 Environment Setup

The implementation of our proposed SDAC frame-

work is based on Node JS. The functionality re-

lated to IOTA addresses, transactions, broadcasting,

and multi-signatures has been implemented using

iota.lib.js (Foundation, 2018), the ofﬁcial JavaScript

library of the IOTA MAM Distributed Ledger Techol-

ogy, which allows issuing and fetching MAM trans-

actions. We simulated a network using the IOTA de-

vnet

as clients, which in turn interacts with an IOTA

full node to issue and fetch data using MAM. In ad-

dition, another IOTA full node was deployed on a lo-

cal server dedicated for performing the Proof of Work

(PoW) operation.

The implementation focuses on the public and re-

stricted operations of MAM. Public operation is uti-

lized to ensure authenticity, and data integrity, while

restricted operation enables users to control access to

healthcare records using the secret key. This is par-

ticularly useful for healthcare applications where per-

missions is required in order to gain access to sensi-

tive data.

5.2 Results and Analysis

Fig. 6 shows the result of sending transaction data to

the Tangle using public operation. It also shows the

output of fetching masked transaction data in which

the user would only require the root, which is the en-

cryption and decryption key. The transaction data sent

using public operation ensures authenticity and data

integrity i.e., conﬁrming that the data is coming from

a particular IoT device. The public operation uses the

root as the address of the transaction that contains the

Figure 6: Publishing transaction data from IoT devices us-

ing Public Operation.

https://nodes.devnet.iota.org

MAM message (channel ID). Consequently, any user

can ﬁnd and decrypt the message in a public operation

by using the address.

Sending Transactions with Restricted Operation.

Fig. 7 shows the result of publishing transactions data

using the restricted operation.

Figure 7: Publishing transactions from IoT devices using

Restricted operation.

Access Right Authorization. Restricted operation

enables granular access control to transaction data and

provides authorization to the transaction data stored

on the Tangle. It only allows participants who have

the secret key to decode the transaction data. Fig.

8 demonstrates the granular access control over the

transaction data stored on the Tangle. It also shows

that when a user fetches transaction data, access will

be authorized, and a user is allowed to decrypt the

transaction data by having the secret key. Therefore,

access will be authorized.

Figure 8: Accessing transaction data with right secret key

(Authorized Access).

Unauthorized Access. Fig. 9 demonstrates the use

of restricted operation with the wrong secret key. A

user who has the wrong secret key will be unable to

access the transaction data stored on the Tangle. It

also shows that when a user is attempting to fetch the

transaction data by having the wrong secret key, ac-

cess will be unauthorized. This is in turn useful in IoT

healthcare application in which users will have the

ability to control who can gain access to their health-

care records.

Figure 9: Accessing transaction data with wrong secret key

(Unauthorized Access).

A Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control Framework Using IOTA Tangle for the Internet of Things

183

PoW Execution Time. Fig 10 shows the result of the

execution time when ofﬂoading the PoW compared to

the baseline. As it can be seen from Fig 10 that when

the number of sent transactions are 100, the execution

time of the PoW reaches 1177.5 second and the base-

line reaches 1440.1 second. This is because the PoW

is being ofﬂoaded to a dedicated node with higher re-

sources, while in the baseline the PoW is computed

on the same IoT device.

Figure 10: PoW execution time compared to the baseline.

Scalability. Fig 11 shows the result of the SDAC

framework in terms of scalability with different Min-

imum Weight Magnitude (MWM) settings, and dif-

ferent number of nodes. it is clear that as the num-

ber of nodes increases, the Transaction Per Second

(TPS) transaction speed increases linearly. Conse-

quently, the transaction speed has a good linear scal-

ability when the number of nodes increases. Also, its

clear that when 100 nodes are sending transactions,

the average TPS reaches 1.543 tx/s when the MWM

is set to 14, while the average TPS reaches 1.764 tx/s

when the MWM is set to 9.

Figure 11: Scalability in Tangle with 250 nodes.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper, we have addressed the issue of access

control in IoT by using the IOTA distributed ledger

technology. Speciﬁcally, we have employed the IOTA

MAM protocol using a set of operations, such as pub-

lic and restricted, to grant granular access to data. In

order to achieve access control and ensure scalability,

a scalable decentralized and lightweight access con-

trol framework, called SDAC, has been proposed.

There are a number of interesting directions for

future work. We plan to thoroughly investigate the re-

duction in energy consumption and improve the scal-

ability of the proposed approach by looking into pro-

cessing access requests per unit time that measures

the execution time of various processes such as, at-

tach, encrypt, and decrypt. Then, we plan to develop

an interactive model that enables the users to enter the

secret key to be able to access the data.

Finally, we plan to introduce the concept of mo-

bile agent (Alsboui et al., 2016), in particular multi-

mobile agent with a dynamic multi-mobile agent

itinerary planning mechanism (Alsboui et al., 2021b)

for data collection from healthcare sensors and em-

ploy techniques of information extraction (Alsbou

et al., 2011) in order to further improve the perfor-

mance of the proposed SDAC framework.

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