Flexible, decentralised access control for smart buildings with smart contracts

Leepakshi Bindra, Kalvin Eng, Omid Ardakanian and Eleni Stroulia

Cyber-Physical Systems, 2022, vol. 8, issue 4, 286-320

Abstract: Large commercial buildings are complex cyber-physical systems containing expensive and critical equipment that ensure the safety and comfort of their numerous occupants. Yet occupant and visitor access to spaces and equipment within these buildings are still managed through unsystematic, inefficient, and human-intensive processes. As a standard practice, long-term building occupants are given access privileges to rooms and equipment based on their organisational roles, while visitors have to be escorted by their hosts. This approach is conservative and inflexible. In this paper, we describe a methodology that can flexibly and securely manage building access privileges for long-term occupants and short-term visitors alike, taking into account the risk associated with accessing each space within the building. Our methodology relies on blockchain smart contracts to describe, grant, audit, and revoke fine-grained permissions for building occupants and visitors, in a decentralised fashion. The smart contracts are specified through a process that leverages the information compiled from Brick and BOT models of the building. We illustrate the proposed method through a typical application scenario in the context of a real office building and argue that it can greatly reduce the administration overhead, while, at the same time, providing fine-grained, auditable access control.CCS Concepts: Security and privacy; Security services; Computer systems organisation; Embedded and cyber-physical systems; Sensors and actuators

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23335777.2021.1922502 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tcybxx:v:8:y:2022:i:4:p:286-320

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tcyb20

DOI: 10.1080/23335777.2021.1922502

Access Statistics for this article

Cyber-Physical Systems is currently edited by Yang Xiao

More articles in Cyber-Physical Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().