PARBAC: Priority-Attribute-Based RBAC Model for Azure IoT Cloud

Duties are segregated within a team by using the role-based access control (RBAC) in the Azure Internet of Things (IoT) framework, and only an appropriate level of access is granted to users to perform specific tasks, depending on a given situation. However, the same authentication and authorization mechanism is used for “sort of user,” which increases the operation overload on the cloud server. Moreover, due to its RBAC nature, the IoT framework is inefficient in handling a dynamic situation where multiple users request similar kinds of resources, by creating several repeated roles. This results in inconsistent and inflexible implementation and the loss of the capability to efficiently address policy management, semantics, redundancy issues in roles, dynamic user handling, work delegation issues, scalability, role explosion, individual rights, and security issues in large organizations. In this article, we designed and presented a novel access control model for a significantly large medical scenario with efficient priority-based authentication mechanisms to address the abovementioned problems associated with the Azure IoT cloud. The proposed model encapsulates the enforcement of priority-based resource access rights across multiple users in a large organization, reduces inefficiency and ineffectuality, and supports individuals with the consistent implementation of policies. We evaluated the benefits of the proposed model by comparing it with existing models and the Azure model, using the healthcare use-case situation. The comparison results show that by incorporating the priority attribute facility in the existing RBAC model, the proposed model classifies the policy mechanism based on priority attributes and proves that the proposed model is capable of handling problems that generally occur when dealing with huge dynamic scenarios in large organizations.