Access Control in the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an ecosystem that consists of -among others --various networked sensors and actuators, achieving mainly advancements related with lowering production costs and providing workflow flexibility. Introducing access control in such environments is considered to be challenging, mainly due to the variety of technologies and protocols in IIoT devices and networks. Thus, various access control models and mechanisms should be examined, as well as the additional access control requirements posed by these industrial environments. To achieve these aims, we elaborate on existing state-of-the-art access control models and architectures and investigate access control requirements in IIoT, respectively. These steps provide valuable indications on what type of an access control model and architecture may be beneficial for application in the IIoT. We describe an access control architecture capable of achieving access control in IIoT using a layered approach and based on existing virtualization concepts (e.g., the cloud). Furthermore, we provide information on the functionality of the individual access control related components, as well as where these should be placed in the overall architecture. Considering this research area to be challenging, we finally discuss open issues and anticipate these directions to provide interesting multi-disciplinary insights in both industry and academia.

A Distributed Fog-based Access Control Architecture for IoT

“…To compare our work with the existing solutions discussed in the related work section, we used the requirements mentioned in Section 1. As it can be seen from Table 1, [14], [15], [16], and [17] achieve all the requirements, except decentralization and availability. However, our model fulfills all requirements, including decentralization and availability.…”

“…Another deployment for ABAC was proposed in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in [16] where the eXtended Access Control Markup Language (XACML) standard is used. The XAML functional points are distributed in the IIoT architecture.…”

Protocol-Based and Hybrid Access Control for the IoT: Approaches and Research Opportunities

“…In recent years, we have observed that IoT applications are gaining much popularity in industrial sectors. For instance, industrial IoT (i.e., IIoT) discusses the communication in machine-to-machine (M2M) and associated industrial communication technologies for more flexible and adaptive automation applications [101]. This is to note that the terms IoT and IIoT cannot be used interchangeably.…”

“…IIoT is responsible for collecting data from different sensors embedded in the production devices, and it helps in the automation of advanced manufacturing machines. However, there is high heterogeneity of IIoT standards, techniques, and protocols, and hence, access control in this environment is challenging [101,112,113]. Due to the complexity of the IIoT environment as discussed above, the employment of ProBAC and HyBAC is beneficial to improve the security of this emerging technology.…”

Data security sharing model based on privacy protection for blockchain‐enabled industrial Internet of Things

“…Salonikias et al 15 and Li et al 16 introduce the latest access control model and architecture in detail, and separately studies the access control requirements in IIoT. Then an access control architecture is proposed, which can use a layered approach and implement access control in the IIoT based on existing virtualization concepts.…”