IoT-TrustChain: A Blockchain-Based Access Control Framework with Delegation and Event Awareness for Resource-Constrained IoT Environment
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow rapidly, bringing unprecedented challenges in access control due to its heterogeneity, large-scale deployments, and resource-constrained devices. Traditional access control systems like centralized Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and static Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), do not meet real time, distributed, and contextual needs of the contemporary IoT environment. Although blockchain-based access control is a potentially promising alternative, existing solutions have serious flaws, such as high decision latency, weak delegation support, event responsiveness, and resource-inefficient resource utilization, especially in the limited IoT context. This study has highlighted some of the important shortcomings of existing models, such as the high latency of models under dynamic workloads, non-responsiveness to contextual policies, and wasteful use of gas because of poorly designed smart contracts. We suggest IoT-TrustChain a new blockchain-based access control system incorporating ABAC with event-based policy triggers, dynamic delegation, 1 and emergency override features. The architecture is resource-specifically tailored to support resource-constrained deployments in the IoT and is flexible and resource-efficient. In IoT-TrustChain have a set of smart contracts that we have created in Solidity and are running on a local Ethereum testbed using the Truffle framework. The experimental assessment in various operational conditions with benchmarks against the state-of-the-art models show that IoT-TrustChain operates with a reduction in the access decision latency rate of up to 43%, gas consumption rate of over 45%, and responsiveness of the policy update rate of 38%. In addition, the system is shown to have a latency of less than 200ms when subjected to composite event loads, which confirms that the system is useful in real-time and scalable IoT applications. The results indicate that IoT-TrustChain fills the gap existing between the concepts of decentralization, flexibility, and performance in the scope of the IoT access control, providing a holistic solution to the contemporary IoT ecosystems.
Source: Research Square
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166844314