Context-Aware Adaptive Remote Access for IoT Applications

The rapid growth of communication networking, ubiquitous sensing, and signal processing has spurred the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) era. As a novel cutting-edge technology, the IoT enables a plethora of smart-devices equipped with diverse computing, sensing, and actuation capabilities to be connected to the Internet. Thus, it promises to provide a revolutionary and fully connected “smart” world while greatly developing economies and enhancing the quality of life. IoT is indeed an emergent global phenomenon, where real-time remote access to data and applications opens new unprecedented opportunities for ubiquitous monitoring and managing. In such dynamic, interconnected, and heterogeneous environment where the context conditions (location, time, situation sensitivity, etc.) are continuously and frequently changing, context-aware and adaptive solutions for data access are required to respond to the applications’ needs. Nevertheless, until now, no schemes provide concrete context-aware access control mechanisms in IoT. In this article, we design a novel context-aware attribute-based access control (CAABAC) that considers the dynamic context changes. The proposed approach incorporates the contextual information with the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to guarantee adaptive contextual access to data. The extensive analysis and simulations prove both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Specifically, context-aware and adaptive remote access is enabled while outperforming other benchmarked schemes in terms of storage, communication, and computational cost.