Trustworthy Context-Aware Access Control in IoT Environments based on the Fog Computing Paradigm

The strongly increasing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments is currently leading to a rapidly changing landscape of innovative services for end-users. These changes need to be accompanied by appropriate computer networking, data analysis, security, and access control concepts to allow for scalability, safe usage, and overall safety and, thus, improved usability and intelligence in future IoT ecosystems.

Fog Computing enables the shift of data processing, communication capabilities, and intelligence of IoT environments to the IoT network's edges, closer to or even into the end-devices. These facts enable further improvements of the IoT security, leading to safer IoT systems, which allow users more control over their data and privacy settings. Moreover, offloading computationally-intensive security operations from IoT devices (sensors and actuators) to computationally-richer Fog Nodes enables creating trustworthy IoT environments with more secure data transmission and storage approaches.

This PhD project aims to model, implement, and evaluate access control mechanisms for Fog computing-based IoT environments, such as Smart Homes or Smart Buildings, as well as discover new opportunities for enhancing access control based on the current state of IoT environments. Hence, the planned research will focus on adapting and further development of novel access control models in IoT environments. Moreover, during the research, contextual factors of IoT environments and their impact on access control will be examined.