Capability-based Access Control Research Articles

Assessment of energy consumption for information flow control protocols in IoT devices

In the IoT (Internet of Things), millions of devices are interconnected and devices support too poor computation resources to install enough security functions to protect from malicious accesses. Hence, devices have to be supported with access control mechanisms. The CBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) model is most useful to be as access control model for IoT devices because it is sufficient for each device to just check the capability of each access request. However, illegal and late information flows among devices and subjects occur. Types of IFC (Information Flow Control) protocols like the OI and TBOI protocols to prevent illegal and late types of information flows are proposed in our previous studies. A secure device supports the CBAC model and the IFC protocols. First, an EC (Energy Consumption) model is proposed to show how a secure device consumes the electric energy in this paper. By using the EC model, the IFC protocols are evaluated in terms of the energy consumed by secure devices. A secure device mostly consumes energy to check capability tokens of each access request. In the simulation, the energy consumed by secure devices to process access requests can be reduced by selecting only tokens required. About 69% and 73% of energy in the OI and TBOI protocols can be reduced by adopting the CTS (Capability Token Selection) algorithms, respectively.

Design of a Decentralized Identifier-Based Authentication and Access Control Model for Smart Homes

In recent years, smart homes have garnered extensive attention as a prominent application scenario of IoT technology. However, the unique characteristics of smart homes have brought forth serious security threats, emphasizing the paramount importance of identity authentication and access control. The conventional centralized approach is plagued by the issue of having a “single point of failure,” while existing distributed solutions are constrained by limited device resources and the complexities of identity authentication. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a smart home authentication and access control model based on decentralized identifiers (DIDs). By leveraging the inherent decentralization of DIDs, which rely on blockchain, a distributed environment is constructed, effectively mitigating the problem of the “single point of failure.” In this model, every participant in the smart home system, including users and smart devices, is uniquely identified by DIDs and through the integration of an improved capability-based access control scheme, which streamlines the user identity authentication process, reduces authentication complexity, and enables convenient cross-household access with a single registration. Our experimental results demonstrate that the application of decentralized identifiers provides the model with various security attributes, including confidentiality, integrity, and traceability. Additionally, the model exhibits low time costs for each module, ensuring timely responses to access service requests and incurring lower gas consumption compared to other Ethereum-based methods. Thus, our research proposes a lightweight authentication and access control solution suitable for smart home environments.

Enabling Decentralized and Auditable Access Control for IoT through Blockchain and Smart Contracts

The increase in the interconnection of physical devices and the emergence of the 5 G paradigm foster the generation and distribution of massive amounts of data. The complexity associated with the management of these data requires a suitable access control approach that empowers citizens to control how their data are shared, so potential privacy issues can be mitigated. While well-known access control models are widely used in web and cloud scenarios, the IoT ecosystem needs to address the requirements of lightness, decentralization, and scalability to control the access to data generated by a huge number of heterogeneous devices. This work proposes CapBlock, a design that integrates a capability-based access control model and blockchain technology for a fully distributed evaluation of authorization policies and generation of access credentials using smart contracts. CapBlock is intended to manage the access to information in federated IoT environments where data need to be managed through access control policies defined by different data providers. The feasibility of CapBlock has been successfully evaluated in the scope of the EU research project IoTCrawler, which aims at building a secure search engine for IoT data in large-scale scenarios.

Capability token selection algorithms to implement lightweight protocols

The IoT (Internet of Things) is now one of the most significant infrastructure and has to be secure against malicious accesses. Especially, it is critical to make devices secure in the IoT. In the CBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) model adopted to the IoT, device owners issue subjects capability tokens, i.e. a set of access rights on objects in devices. Objects in devices are data resource manipulated by subjects. Data are exchanged among subjects and objects through manipulating objects. Here, if subjects attempt to manipulate objects in accordance with the capability tokens issued, the subjects can get data which the subjects are not authorized to get, i.e. illegal information flow and late information flow occur. In our previous studies, protocols are implemented to prevent both illegal and late types of information flows from occurring. Here, operations implying such information flows are interrupted. However, the request processing time gets longer as the number of capability tokens used increases. In this paper, an MRCTSD (Minimum Required Capability Token Selection for Devices) algorithm is newly proposed to reduce the number of capability tokens used. In the evaluation, it is shown that the request processing times and the numbers of capability tokens used in the lightweight protocols realized with the MRCTSD algorithm are shorter and smaller than the conventional protocols, respectively.

Capability-Based Access Control With Trust for Effective Healthcare Systems

Because of the expanding fame of distributed storage, numerous medicinal services associations have begun moving electronic wellbeing records or EHR to cloud-based capacity frameworks. This change can diminish the expenses related with the administration of information sharing, correspondence overhead, and improve the Quality of Service. In this paper, we have projected an entrance regulator prototype which depends on the dependability of the mentioned client. This Access Control based Trust Model for Healthcare System structure made out of the trust component, trust model with access control approaches which upgrades exactness and effectiveness of the framework. This entrance control system will guarantee the main trusted and approved client can get to the information and assets. The detail structure and introduction of the working prototype show that the exactness and effectiveness of the social insurance framework identified with cloud are more when contrasted with other trust models.

A Traceable Capability-based Access Control for IoT

Delegation mechanism in Internet of Things (IoT) allows users to share some of their permissions with others. Cloud-based delegation solutions require that only the user who has registered in the cloud can be delegated permissions. It is not convenient when a permission is delegated to a large number of temporarily users. Therefore, some works like CapBAC delegate permissions locally in an offline way. However, this is difficult to revoke and modify the offline delegated permissions. In this work, we propose a traceable capability-based access control approach (TCAC) that can revoke and modify permissions by tracking the trajectories of permissions delegation. We define a time capability tree (TCT) that can automatically extract permissions trajectories, and we also design a new capability token to improve the permission verification, revocation and modification efficiency. The experiment results show that TCAC has less token verification and revocation/modification time than those of CapBAC and xDBAuth. TCAC can discover 73.3% unvisited users in the case of delegating and accessing randomly. This provides more information about the permissions delegation relationships, and opens up new possibilities to guarantee the global security in IoT delegation system. To the best of our knowledge, TCAC is the first work to capture the unvisited permissions.

Combining IOTA and Attribute-Based Encryption for Access Control in the Internet of Things.

Unauthorized resource access represents a typical security threat in the Internet of Things (IoT), while distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and IOTA) hold great promise to address this threat. Although blockchain-based IoT access control schemes have been the most popular ones, they suffer from several significant limitations, such as high monetary cost and low throughput of processing access requests. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel IoT access control scheme by combining the fee-less IOTA technology and the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology. To control the access to a resource, a token, which records access permissions to this resource, is encrypted by the CP-ABE technology and uploaded to the IOTA Tangle (i.e., the underlying database of IOTA). Any user can fetch the encrypted token from the Tangle, while only those who can decrypt this token are authorized to access the resource. In this way, the proposed scheme enables not only distributed, fee-less and scalable access control thanks to the IOTA but also fine-grained attribute-based access control thanks to the CP-ABE. We show the feasibility of our scheme by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype system using smart phones (Google Pixel 3XL) and a commercial IoT gateway (NEC EGW001). We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of access request processing throughput. The experimental results show that our scheme enables object owners to authorize access rights to a large number of subjects in a much (about 5 times) shorter time than the existing access control scheme called Decentralized Capability-based Access Control framework using IOTA (DCACI), significantly improving the access request processing throughput.

Information Flow Control Based on Capability Token Validity for Secure IoT: Implementation and Evaluation

In the CBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) model proposed for realizing the secure IoT (Internet of Things), authorizers issue subjects capability tokens, i.e. sets of access rights on objects in devices. Objects are data resources which are used to store sensor data and action data. Data of an object may be stored in another object through communication among subjects and devices. A subject can get data of an object from another object even if the subject is not allowed to get the data, i.e. information illegally flows from the object to the subject. In addition, a subject can get data generated at time before which the capability token to get the data starts to be valid. Here, information flows from the object to the subject later than expected by the subject to get the data. In our previous studies, the OI (Operation Interruption) and the TBOI (Time-Based OI) protocols are proposed to interrupt operations implying illegal type of information flow and not only illegal but also late types of information flows, respectively. In this paper, the TBOI protocol is designed and implemented. In the evaluation, it is shown the late information flow is prevented in addition to the illegal one in the TBOI protocol although the request processing time is almost the same as the OI protocol.

Implementation and evaluation of the information flow control for the Internet of Things

AbstractIn the Internet of Things, the CBAC (capability‐based access control) model is proposed to make devices securely accessed. Here, an owner of a device issues a capability token, that is, a set of access rights, to a subject. The subject is allowed to manipulate ROs (resource objects) in the device according to access rights in the capability token. In the CBAC model, there is a problem a subject sbi can obtain data of an RO by accessing the data in an RO after the data are brought to the RO even if the subject sbi is not allowed to obtain the data from the RO . Here, the data in the RO illegally flow to the subject sbi. In our previous studies, the OI (operation interruption) protocol where illegal operations are interrupted is proposed and evaluated in the simulation. In this article, we implement the OI protocol and evaluate the authorization process of the OI protocol in terms of the execution time. In the evaluation, we make clear the features of the execution time of authorization processes for GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE operations in the OI protocol.

IoT-CCAC: a blockchain-based consortium capability access control approach for IoT.

Access control is a critical aspect for improving the privacy and security of IoT systems. A consortium is a public or private association or a group of two or more institutes, businesses, and companies that collaborate to achieve common goals or form a resource pool to enable the sharing economy aspect. However, most access control methods are based on centralized solutions, which may lead to problems like data leakage and single-point failure. Blockchain technology has its intrinsic feature of distribution, which can be used to tackle the centralized problem of traditional access control schemes. Nevertheless, blockchain itself comes with certain limitations like the lack of scalability and poor performance. To bridge the gap of these problems, here we present a decentralized capability-based access control architecture designed for IoT consortium networks named IoT-CCAC. A blockchain-based database is utilized in our solution for better performance since it exhibits favorable features of both blockchain and conventional databases. The performance of IoT-CCAC is evaluated to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed architecture. IoT-CCAC is a secure, salable, effective solution that meets the enterprise and business’s needs and adaptable for different IoT interoperability scenarios.

SFAC:A Smart Contract-Based Fine-Grained Access Control for Internet of Things

With the development of Internet of things, more and more objects are connected to the Internet. It will lead to data leakage caused by arbitrary access easily. Thus, an effective method to prevent data leakage is needed. Traditional access control schemes include role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and capability-based access control (CapBAC) are all using a central or a third trusted party to manage user information, which is prone to single failure. In order to solve the problems, in this paper, a fine-grained access control scheme based on blockchain technology named SFAC is proposed. In recent years, blockchain technology has been widely studied and applied in various fields. It has the advantages of decentralization, imitation tampering, and traceability, and is a distributed public ledger. Therefore, combined with blockchain, SFAC can not only solve the problem of centralization, but also allow users to request resources in batches, and uses token mechanism to facilitate users’ requests. After the user gets a token, it can directly use the token to revoke resources. Besides, we use a smart contract to implement our proposed scheme and carrying out a series of experiments on the test network of Ethereum. The experimental results show that our SAFC is feasible.

Time‐based legality of information flow in the capability‐based access control model for the Internet of Things

SummaryThe Internet of Things is composed of sensor and actuator devices. Devices have to be securely accessed by subjects. In this article, we take the capability‐based access control (CBAC) model where a subject is issued a capability token to manipulate a device by a device owner. In the CBAC model, information which a subject is not allowed to get may illegally flow to the subject. Hence, the operation interruption (OI) protocol to prevent illegal information flow is proposed in our previous studies. However, although a subject is not allowed to get data at time , the subject can get the data later than the time . Here, the data come to the subject later than expected by the subject to get the data, that is, the information flows late to the subject. In this article, we newly propose a time‐based OI (TBOI) protocol to prevent not only illegal information flow but also late information flow. Here, operations implying illegal or late information flow are interrupted, that is, not performed at devices. In the evaluation, we show not only illegal information flow but also late information flow are prevented in the TBOI protocol differently from the OI protocol.

Exploiting Smart Contracts for Capability-Based Access Control in the Internet of Things.

Due to the rapid penetration of the Internet of Things (IoT) into human life, illegal access to IoT resources (e.g., data and actuators) has greatly threatened our safety. Access control, which specifies who (i.e., subjects) can access what resources (i.e., objects) under what conditions, has been recognized as an effective solution to address this issue. To cope with the distributed and trust-less nature of IoT systems, we propose a decentralized and trustworthy Capability-Based Access Control (CapBAC) scheme by using the Ethereum smart contract technology. In this scheme, a smart contract is created for each object to store and manage the capability tokens (i.e., data structures recording granted access rights) assigned to the related subjects, and also to verify the ownership and validity of the tokens for access control. Different from previous schemes which manage the tokens in units of subjects, i.e., one token per subject, our scheme manages the tokens in units of access rights or actions, i.e., one token per action. Such novel management achieves more fine-grained and flexible capability delegation and also ensures the consistency between the delegation information and the information stored in the tokens. We implemented the proposed CapBAC scheme in a locally constructed Ethereum blockchain network to demonstrate its feasibility. In addition, we measured the monetary cost of our scheme in terms of gas consumption to compare our scheme with the existing Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Capability-Based Access Control (BlendCAC) scheme proposed by other researchers. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the BlendCAC scheme in terms of the flexibility, granularity, and consistency of capability delegation at almost the same monetary cost.

Capability Based Outsourced Data Access Control with Assured File Deletion and Efficient Revocation with Trust Factor in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has introduced a paradigm which support data outsourcing to third parties for processing using commodity clusters. It allows the owner to outsource sensitive data and share it with the authorized user while reducing the computation and management cost. Since owners store sensitive data over the cloud, the requirements of access control and data security have also been increasing. To alleviate all the problem requirements, the need has arisen for providing a safe, secure, and sound model. The existing solutions for these problems use pure cryptographic techniques, which increases the computation cost. In this article, the security problems are solved by using a trusted third party and a quorum of key managers. A service provider is responsible for capability-based access control to ensure that only authorized users will be able to access the data. Whenever any data revocation is required, the data owner simply updates this information to the master key manager to revoke a specific number of shares. The model for the proposed work has been presented and its analysis shows how it introduces security features.

Information Flow Control Based on the CapBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) Model in the IoT

In the Internet of Things (IoT), not only computers like servers but also devices with sensor and actuator devices are interconnected. It is critical to make the IoT secure, especially devices. In the capability-based access control (CapBAC) model proposed to make IoT devices secure, an owner of each device issues a capability token, i.e. a set of access rights, to a subject. Only a subject holding the capability token is allowed to manipulate the device. However, a subject may get data in a device d1 via another device d2 although the subject holds no capability token to get data from the device d1. Here, the data in the device d1 illegally flow to the subject. In this article, the authors propose the operation interruption (OI) protocol where illegal get operations are interrupted. In the evaluation, the ratio of the number of get operations interrupted to the total number of get operations is kept constant even if the numbers of subjects and access rights granted to each subject increase in the OI protocol.

Exploration of blockchain-enabled decentralized capability-based access control strategy for space situation awareness

Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven application systems framework couples online data with offline models to enhance performance by using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control (AC) to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right to data and services. Due to decentralization and heterogeneity of SSA systems, it is challenging to build an efficient centralized AC system, which can either be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. Inspired by the blockchain and smart contract technology, we introduce blockchain-enabled, decentralized, capability-based access control (BlendCAC), a decentralized authentication, and capability-based AC mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services, and information in SSA networks. To achieve secure identity authentication, the BlendCAC leverages the blockchain to create virtual trust zones, in which distributed components can identify and update each other in a trustless network environment. A robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of the smart contract for registration, propagation, and revocation of the access authorization. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices (i.e., Raspberry Pi nodes emulating satellites with sensor observations) and more powerful computing devices (i.e., laptops emulating a ground network) and is tested on a private Ethereum blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC scheme to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight, and fine-grained AC solution for space system toward SSA.

An adaptive and configurable protection framework against android privilege escalation threats

Android is a successful mobile platform with a thriving application ecosystem. However, despite its security precautions like permission mechanism, it is still vulnerable to privilege escalation threats and particularly confused deputy attacks that exploit the permission leak vulnerabilities of Android applications. Worse, most existing detection and protection techniques have become costly and unresponsive in current Android dynamic permission environments. In this paper, we propose a configurable Android security framework to prevent the exploitation of permission leak vulnerabilities of third-party applications via confused deputy attacks. Our framework collects the runtime states of applications and enforces policy and capability-based access control to restrain riskful inter-application communications, so as to provide more responsive, adaptive, and flexible application protection. Besides, our framework provides users with a flexible runtime policy configuration together with a complementary security mechanism to mitigate risks induced by inappropriate policies. Additionally, we present a sophisticated access decision cache system with a proactive maintenance method that ensures the efficiency and dependability of decision services. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that our approach provides configurable and effective protections for third-party applications against permission leak vulnerabilities at small performance and usability costs.

BlendCAC: A Smart Contract Enabled Decentralized Capability-Based Access Control Mechanism for the IoT

While Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been widely recognized as an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new challenges in terms of privacy and security. Access control (AC) is among the top security concerns, which is critical in resource and information protection over IoT devices. Traditional access control approaches, like Access Control Lists (ACL), Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC), are not able to provide a scalable, manageable and efficient mechanism to meet the requirements of IoT systems. Another weakness in today’s AC is the centralized authorization server, which can cause a performance bottleneck or be the single point of failure. Inspired by the smart contract on top of a blockchain protocol, this paper proposes BlendCAC, which is a decentralized, federated capability-based AC mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services and information in large-scale IoT systems. A federated capability-based delegation model (FCDM) is introduced to support hierarchical and multi-hop delegation. The mechanism for delegate authorization and revocation is explored. A robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of the smart contract for registration, propagation, and revocation of the access authorization. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices (i.e., Raspberry PI nodes) and more powerful computing devices (i.e., laptops) and tested on a local private blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained AC solution for IoT systems.

Fine-grained Access Control Framework for Igor, a Unified Access Solution to The Internet of Things

With the growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), devices in households and offices are becoming information sharing “smart” devices controlled via network connections. The growth of collection, handling and distribution of data generated by IoT devices presents ethical and privacy issues. Users have no control over what information is kept or revealed, the interpretation of data collected, data ownership and who can access specific information generated by their IoT devices. This paper describes an approach to data ethical/privacy issues related to IoT using a fine-grained access-control framework on Igor, a centralized home and office automation solution. We designed a capability-based access control framework on top of Igor that allows agents, either human or machine, to access and change only the data to which they are authorised. The applicability of this to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be obvious. The implementation, expert evaluation and performance measurement results demonstrate that this is a promising solution for securing access to data generated by IoT devices.

Capability-Based Access Control with ECC Key Management for the M2M Local Cloud Platform

One of the critical requirement in managing security of any computing system is access control, which includes protection and access management to the available resources. This requirement becomes more strict especially in a distributed computing environment that consists of constrained devices such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M). New challenges in access control are identified in a system comprises a group of distributed multiple M2M gateways forming a so called M2M local cloud platform (Vallati et al. in Wirel Trans Commun 87(3):1071–1091, 2016). Scalability is obviously a necessity which is lacking in some existing access control system. In addition, flexibility in managing access from users or entity belonging to other authorization domains as well as delegating access right are not provided as an integrated features. Lately, the capability-based access control has been suggested as method to manage access for M2M as the key enabler of Internet of Things. In this paper, a capability based access control equipped with Elliptic Curve Cryptography based key management is proposed for the M2M local cloud platform. The feasibility of the proposed capability based access control and key management are tested by implementing them within the security manager that is part of the overall component of the platform architecture, and evaluating their performances by a series of experimentations.