Context Sensitive Access Control in Smart Home Environments

The rise in popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has opened doors for privacy and security breaches in Cyber-Physical systems like smart homes, smart vehicles, and smart grids that affect our daily existence. IoT systems are also a source of big data that gets shared via cloud. IoT systems in a smart home environment have sensitive access control issues since they are deployed in a personal space. The collected data can also be of highly personal nature. Therefore, it is critical to build access control models that govern who, under what circumstances, can access which sensed data or actuate a physical system. Traditional access control mechanisms are not expressive enough to handle such complex access control needs, warranting the incorporation of new methodologies for privacy and security. In this paper, we propose the creation of the PALS system, that builds upon existing work in attribute based access control model, captures physical context collected from sensed data (attributes), and performs dynamic reasoning over these attributes and context driven policies using Semantic Web technologies to execute access control decisions. Reasoning over user context, details of information collected by cloud service provider and device type our mechanism generates as a consequent access control decisions. Our system’s access control decisions are supplemented by another sub-system that detects intrusions into smart home systems based on both network and behavioral data. The combined approach serves to determine indicators that a smart home system is under attack, as well as limit what data breach such attacks can achieve.