An Internet of Things Based Multi-Level Privacy-Preserving Access Control for Smart Living

Abstract

The presence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare through the use of mobile medical applications and wearable devices allows patients to capture their healthcare data and enables healthcare professionals to be up-to-date with a patient’s status. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which is considered as one of the major applications of IoT, is a home environment augmented with embedded ambient sensors to help improve an individual’s quality of life. This domain faces major challenges in providing safety and security when accessing sensitive health data. This paper presents an access control framework for AAL which considers multi-level access and privacy preservation. We focus on two major points: (1) how to use the data collected from ambient sensors and biometric sensors to perform the high-level task of activity recognition; and (2) how to secure the collected private healthcare data via effective access control. We achieve multi-level access control by extending Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for secure authentication and utilizing Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for authorization. The proposed access control system regulates access to healthcare data by defining policy attributes over healthcare professional groups and data classes classifications. We provide guidelines to classify the data classes and healthcare professional groups and describe security policies to control access to the data classes.