Identity Authentication and Capability Based Access Control (IACAC) for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In the last few years the Internet of Things (IoT) has seen widespreadapplication and can be found in each field. Authentication and accesscontrol are important and critical functionalities in the context of IoTto enable secure communication between devices. Mobility, dynamicnetwork topology and weak physical security of low power devices in IoTnetworks are possible sources for security vulnerabilities. It ispromising to make an authentication and access control attack resistant andlightweight in a resource constrained and distributed IoT environment.This paper presents the Identity Authentication and Capability basedAccess Control (IACAC) model with protocol evaluation and performanceanalysis. To protect IoT from man-in-the-middle, replay and denial ofservice (Dos) attacks, the concept of capability for access control isintroduced. The novelty of this model is that, it presents an integratedapproach of authentication and access control for IoT devices. Theresults of other related study have also been analyzed to validate andsupport our findings. Finally, the proposed protocol is evaluated byusing security protocol verification tool and verification results showsthat IACAC is secure against aforementioned attacks. This paper alsodiscusses performance analysis of the protocol in terms of computationaltime compared to other existing solutions. Furthermore, this paper addresseschallenges in IoT and security attacks are modelled with the use casesto give an actual view of IoT networks.