Access Control Models for Cloud-Enabled Internet of Things: A Proposed Architecture and Research Agenda

摘要

The concept and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) has continued to develop momentum over recent years. Several different layered architectures for IoT have been proposed, although there is no consensus yet on a widely accepted architecture. In general, the proposed IoT architectures comprise three main components: an object layer, one or more middle layers, and an application layer. The main difference in detail is in the middle layers. Some include a cloud services layer for managing IoT things. Some propose virtual objects as digital counterparts for physical IoT objects. Sometimes both cloud services and virtual objects are included.In this paper, we take a first step toward our eventual goal of developing an authoritative family of access control models for a cloud-enabled Internet of Things. Our proposed access-control oriented architecture comprises four layers: an object layer, a virtual object layer, a cloud services layer, and an application layer. This 4-layer architecture serves as a framework to build access control models for a cloud-enabled IoT. Within this architecture, we present illustrative examples that highlight some IoT access control issues leading to a discussion of needed access control research. We identify the need for communication control within each layer and across adjacent layers (particularly in the lower layers), coupled with the need for data access control (particularly in the cloud services and application layers).