Attribute-Based Access Control for the Swarm With Distributed Policy Management

• Published in: IEEE transactions on consumer electronics 2019-02, Vol.65 (1), p.90-98
• Main Authors: Fedrecheski, Geovane, De Biase, Laisa Caroline Costa, Calcina-Ccori, Pablo C., Zuffo, Marcelo Knorich
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Authorization; Consumer electronics; Control systems; Cybersecurity; Density; edge computing; Graphical user interface; Internet of Things; IoT swarm; NIST; Performance evaluation; Scalability; Security management; Usability; usable security
• ISSN: 0098-3063; 1558-4127
• DOI: 10.1109/TCE.2018.2883382

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing society by enabling everyday life objects with processing and communication. The Swarm is an edge-centric IoT approach in which independent, cross-niche, and heterogeneous devices can cooperate with each other to execute tasks synergistically. Access control is indispensable for the Swarm, as it ensures confidentiality and ownership, and prevents cyber-attacks since only authorized services can communicate. Although many access control models do exist, there is a lack of edge-based and easy-to-use access control systems in the consumer electronics field. This paper presents a distributed attribute-based access control system for the Swarm. It features a distributed policy management GUI that allows users to setup policies for IoT devices in a decentralized way. The proposed system is evaluated according to a set of national institute of standards and technologies quality metrics, and it is also subject to a performance evaluation. Results indicate that the system offers good usability factors and can handle from 10 000 to 6 billion services when considering, respectively, an arbitrary graph density of 20% and a social-based graph density of 0.000034%.