This is the prototype implementation of the Device Rental Platform described in Péter Garamvölgyi's Bachelor's thesis Blockchain-based access control of device access in cyber-physical systems (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group. Advisor: Imre Kocsis.) The full thesis is available in this repository under the documents folder.
The Device Rental Platform is a platform for selling time-limited, exlusive access to resources, with a special emphasis on CPS/IoT devices and the services they provide. The platform leverages Ethereum's smart contracts for access control and payments. This smart contract was designed using UML state diagrams. The smart contract also supports Diffie-Hellman key exchange over the blockchain. Simple device and client SDKs are also provided.
As a result of the recent success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the underlying blockchain technology has been applied to numerous new application domains in various industries. Many expect this technology to be a key enabler of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) applications, with a special emphasis on the Internet of Things (IoT). This thesis reviews the state of the art of both blockchain and CPS technologies and discusses the design and implementation of the Device Rental System.
The Device Rental System is a platform combining blockchain and CPS technologies that enables users to sell access to their CPS devices on the Ethereum platform, with a special emphasis on the time-limited, exclusive access pattern. As part of the access control mechanism, a Diffie-Hellman-based on-chain key exchange protocol is presented. Furthermore, a novel, UML-based method of developing Ethereum smart contracts on the blockchain is discussed, with which developers can avoid many of the pitfalls and challenges of smart contract programming.