ASCIOT: An Attribute-Based Smart Contract Framework for Cross-Organizational Access Control in Precision Agriculture IoT
The adoption of IoT in agriculture has moved fast, probably too fast for security to keep pace. In open, distributed farming environments, we are suddenly asking soil sensors, weather stations, and actuators to trust each other, frequently across organizational boundaries, with no central authority to validate everything. That gap is where we started. This paper presents ASCIOT, a framework we built to let IoT devices and the laboratories managing them establish trust dynamically, using Hyperledger Fabric and smart contracts instead of any single point of control. The work grew out of a concrete problem: two research labs at ESTF (The Higher School of Technology) in Fez, Morocco, each running its own smart farming setup, needed to share sensor access without either lab losing authority. Our solution was to put authentication and audit logging on-chain, where tampering is practically impossible, and push heavier computation and bulk storage off-chain where it wouldn't block the network. We implemented attribute-based access control (ABAC) with four certificate bound attributes: role, department, zone, and building, which turned out to be granular enough for real world politics but not so complex that deployment became unmanageable. The test suite of the proposed framework covers 46 cases across registration, sensor updates, authentication, and access control, all successfully passed.