XSACd - Cross-domain resource sharing & access control for smart environments

Abstract Computing devices permeate working and living environments, affecting all aspects of modern everyday lives; a trend which is expected to intensify in the coming years. In the residential setting, the enhanced features and services provided by said computing devices constitute what is typically referred to as a “smart home”. However, the direct interaction smart devices often have with the physical world, along with the processing, storage and communication of data pertaining to users’ lives, i.e. private sensitive in nature, bring security concerns into the limelight. The resource-constraints of the platforms being integrated into a smart home environment, and their heterogeneity in hardware, network and overlaying technologies, only exacerbate the above issues. This paper presents XSACd, a cross-domain resource sharing & access control framework for smart environments, combining the well-studied fine-grained access control provided by the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) with the benefits of Service Oriented Architectures, through the use of the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS). Based on standardized technologies, it enables seamless interactions and fine-grained policy-based management of heterogeneous smart devices, including support for communication between distributed networks, via the associated MQ Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT)–based proxies. The framework is implemented in full, and its performance is evaluated on a test bed featuring relatively resource-constrained smart platforms and embedded devices, verifying the feasibility of the proposed approach.