HAC: Enable High Efficient Access Control for Information-Centric Internet of Things

Abstract

Information-centric networking (ICN) is regarded as a promising architecture for Internet of Things (ICN-IoT) and access control is one of the critical problems to enable secure ICN-IoT. This article proposes high efficient access control (HAC), a high efficient access control system for ICN-IoT. Specifically, HAC enables access control via an elaborate designed hierarchical key tree (HKT) mechanism based on the hierarchical naming scheme of ICN. The proposed HKT contains the hierarchical authority information and allow users to locally derive the key according to their needs, thus greatly decreasing the overhead in IoT’s many-to-many communication scenario. To ensure the security and efficiency of HKT, we further propose a level-oriented ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (LOCP-ABE) algorithm such that users can only obtain the authority level according to their attributes, and also utilize the ICN’s receiver-driven model and the in-network caching mechanism to speed up the distribution efficiency. Moreover, an attribute-based command verification mechanism is used to improve the efficiency of command verification for resource-constrained and isolated IoT edge. We evaluate the proposed HAC by theoretical security analysis and real-world experiments. The theoretical analysis proves that the proposed HAC is secure and experiment results show that HAC can greatly improve the access control efficiency in ICN-IoT compared with the state of the art.