DAXiot: A Decentralized Authentication and Authorization Scheme for Dynamic IoT Networks

Federated and decentralized networks supporting frequently changing network participants are a requirement for future Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. IoT devices and networks often lack adequate authentication and authorization mechanisms, resulting in insufficient security and privacy for network participants. In this work we address both issues by designing a privacy preserving challenge-response style authentication and authorization scheme based on Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials. Our solution allows decentralized permission management of frequently changing network participants and supports authenticated encryption for data confidentiality. We demonstrate our solution in an MQTT 5.0 scenario and evaluate its security, privacy, as well as its performance.