Access Control Model for Time Series Databases using NGAC

In Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), large amounts of time-series sensor data is collected from devices and machines. Industrial data typically contain sensitive information that may harm the data owner should it leaks. Although such risks exist, selected data frequently needs to be shared in partner eco-systems to take advantage of expertise in analyzing the data and to synchronize between partners collaborating in the production system. Consequently, access control must support efficient data selection and sharing. The access control should be capable of managing and enforcing access policies for different operations and with different levels of granularity, while being simple to properly maintain and potentially automate. In this paper we examine the possible use of Next-Generation Access Control (NGAC) for such access control. NGAC is an attribute-based access control (ABAC) standard based on relations between data elements to create, manage and enforce access control policies. We propose an Access control model that maps the NGAC policy language to the query language of time-series databases to facilitate a secure and efficient data sharing system for IIoT sensor data.