A Distributed Fog-based Access Control Architecture for IoT

The evolution of IoT technology is having a significant impact on people's lives. Almost all areas of people's lives are benefiting from increased productivity and simplification made possible by this trending technology. On the downside, however, the application of IoT technology is posing some security challenges, among them, unauthorized access to IoT devices. This paper presents an Attribute-based Access Control Fog architecture that aims to achieve effective distribution, increase availability and decrease latency. In the proposed architecture, the main functional points of the Attribute-based Access Control are distributed to provide policy decision and policy information mechanisms in fog nodes, locating these functions near end nodes. To evaluate the proposed architecture, an access control engine based on the Attribute-based Access Control was built using the Balana library and simulated using EdgeCloudSim to compare it to the traditional cloud-based architecture. The experiments show that the fog-based architecture provides robust results in terms of reducing latency in making access decisions.