IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2021 - 83

environment. Finally, a blockchain-based implementation has been conducted on the
proposed blockchain-envisioned access control framework for measuring the
computational time needed for varying number of blocks mined in the blockchain and also
for varying number of transactions per block.
& THE INTERNET OF Everything (IoE) has an
important role for the establishment of virtual
communities and ecosystems of several organizations,
such as educational institutions, corporations,smart
firms,and smart homes . IoE is then
an intelligent connection for theuser/people, artificial
intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML)based
data processing, data collection, and Internet
of Things (IoT) as mentioned in Figure 1. The
users are connected through the Internet for their
communication of data over the network that are
collected from varied applications, such as IoT
environment, and such data canmake a significant
influence for decision making. The AI-based data
process is a part of an IoE environment having the
responsibility to deliver the correct information
to the appropriate place, user or people, and
machine at the correct time. The IoT smart devices
are the physical or virtual smart devices/objects
that are connected through the Internet for collecting
sensed real-time information and delivering it
to the respective server or warehouse in order to
make intelligent decision.1;2 The IoE represents an
environment where billions of smart objects having
sensors that sense the neighboring information,
detect measure (e.g., malicious activities),
and also assess their status or sensed information.
Moreover, the IoE is connectedover the public networks
via insecure channel or also sometimes over
the private networks via secure channel according
to the needs, and it follows the standard and proprietary
protocols.2
Since, in an IoE environment, communication
among various heterogeneous types of nodes also
takes place over the public networks or insecure
channels, any attacker can hijack the information
in between the communication. As a result, confidentiality,
authentication, data integrity, freshness,
and nonrepudiation services are essential in
an IoE environment. In addition, several attacks,
such as replay, impersonation, man-in-the-middle,
privileged-insider, physical smart device capture,
and online/offline guessing attacks in case of password/biometric-based
security protocols can be
September/October 2021
launched by the attacker. Moreover, malicious
node deployment and other attacks, such as Sybil,
wormhole, and replication attacks, can be also
launched by the attacker.3 For detection and mitigation
of malicious attacks in an IoE environment,
an access control mechanismshould be deployed.
An access control mechanism in the IoE environment
accomplishes the following two tasks.
Node authentication.In this task, adeployed
legitimate smart device (node) needs to prove its
legitimacy to its neighboring nodes for accessing
the real-time information.
Key establishment. Once mutual authentication
during the node authentication process is
successful, the secret keys (or session keys) are
established between a legitimate deployed node
and its neighboring registered nodes for secure
communications.
An access control scheme can be of two types:
certificate based; and certificateless. In the former
mechanism, a trusted certificate authority ðCAÞ
creates the certificates for all the deployed nodes
using its own private key, and, after that, the
created certificates and other secret credentials
are preloaded in their memory prior to their
deployment.3 It is worth noticing that the majority
of the smart devices deployed in the IoE applications
are basically the devices in an IoT environment,
which are resource-limited devices. Thus, a
heavy certificate, such as X.509, is not desirable in
such applications. Instead of that, a lightweight
digital certificate needs to be preloaded in order to
avoid storage, communication, and computational
overheads of the resource constrained devices for
certificate storage, transmission, and verifying it
by the neighbor devices. To avoid computational
overhead, a certificateless access control mechanism
can be applied in an IoE environment. In this
scenario, the nodes are preloaded with secret credentials,
and the nodes authenticate each other
and then establish secret keys aftermutual authentication.
Though certificateless access control is
efficient, it suffers from other security pitfalls,
such as lack of hash chain renewability.4
83
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2021

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