Decentralized context aware access control model for internet of things

Abstract

Access control mechanisms are a primary security requirement in Internet of Things applications. Traditional access control mechanisms are inefficient while applying directly to IoT applications. Various proposals have been made to adapt traditional access control models for IoT applications. These proposals are either centralized or distributed approaches. In centralized approach, for each access request, it is required that device access central control server to verify access rights via multiple message exchanges. This results in communication overhead at a device side. A single point of failure is also possible if the central server fails. In distributed approach, for each access control request, reliance is still there on a central unit, which again results into communication overhead and possibility of a single point of failure. In IoT applications, access rights are also dependent on various characteristics of the entities involved at the specific instance of access request. These characteristics are interpreted by providing context awareness to the access control models. Context aware access control models are used to provide fine-grained access rights in IoT applications. We propose a decentralized context aware access control model in this paper. Our design results in lesser communication overhead with the central unit and removes single point of failure. Our model uses contextual information to provide fine-grained access control mechanism. Our model provides greater flexibility to users to easily add/modify access control policies for different entities. © 2020 American Scientific Publishers.