Self-sovereign Identity-based Access Control Management in Forestry 4.0.

Today’s forest-based sector has been perceived as an industrial branch that slowly accommodates digital transformation toward Industry 4.0. The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in this sector offers numerous benefits and opportunities for enhanced efficiency, sustainability, and decision-making processes. In Forestry 4.0, which is characterized by its decentralized and heterogeneous nature, enabling transparent, secure, and self-sovereign interconnection and data exchange becomes especially crucial. In this context, authentication and authorization have become vital pillars for ensuring the security of IoT systems. Self-sovereign identities (SSI) enable individuals to have full control over their identities and related information. They can be created, managed, and verified without dependency on a centralized authority. The integration of SSIs into authentication and authorization systems has proven to be robust and secure for communication in various domains such as smart cities and health care. The adoption of SSIs is hypothesized to be the crucial factor in establishing decentralized communication while maintaining tamper-evident and trustworthy systems. From this perspective, we propose our SSI-based generic access control management system in this paper. Concretely, we structure the system based on XACML and integrate DIDs/VCs to enable authentication and authorization processes in a formalized way. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed system in Forestry 4.0 with the passability use case.