Federated Identity and Access Management for the Internet of Things

Abstract

We examine the use of Federated Identity and Access Management (FIAM) approaches for the Internet of Things (IoT). We look at specific challenges that devices, sensors and actuators have, and look for approaches to address them. OAuth is a widely deployed protocol -built on top of HTTP -for applying FIAM to Web systems. We explore the use of OAuth for IoT systems that instead use the lightweight MQTT 3.1 protocol. In order to evaluate this area, we built a prototype that uses OAuth 2.0 to enable access control to information distributed via MQTT. We evaluate the results of this prototyping activity, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and the benefits of using the FIAM approaches with IoT and Machine to Machine (M2M) scenarios. Finally we outline areas for further research.

Mosquitto: server and client implementation of the MQTT protocol

“…• The main mosquitto server • The mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub client utilities that are one method of communicating with an MQTT server • An MQTT client library written in C, with a C++ wrapper Mosquitto allows research directly related to the MQTT protocol itself, such as comparing the performance of MQTT and the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) (Thangavel et al 2014) or investigating the use of OAuth in MQTT (Fremantle et al 2014). Mosquitto supports other research activities as a useful block for building larger systems and has been used to evaluate MQTT for use in Smart City Services (Antonić et al 2015), and in the development of an environmental monitoring system (Bellavista, Giannelli, and Zamagna 2017).…”

A survey of secure middleware for the Internet of Things

“…In Fremantle (2013) and Fremantle et al (2014) it is proposed to use federated identity protocols such as OAuth2 (Hammer-Lahav & Hardt, 2011) with IoT devices, especially around the MQTT protocol (Locke, 2010). The IOT-OAS (Cirani et al, 2015) work similarly addresses the use of OAuth2 with CoAP.…”

“…It is argued in Fremantle et al (2014) that existing hierarchical models of access control are not appropriate for the scale and scope of the IoT. There are two main approaches to address this.…”

“…We and others have proposed the model of using federated identity tokens from the device to the cloud in Fremantle et al (2014), Fremantle, Kopecký & Aziz (2015) and Cirani et al (2015).…”

Towards disappearing user interfaces for ubiquitous computing: human enhancement from sixth sense to super senses

“…Extensive research on the natural sciences not only provides extremely functional UIs through tangible and intangible media, but smart algorithms based on computational intelligence also help predict human behaviours through activity recognition; thus tailor-made responses are astutely delivered to individuals. Further enhancement of the HCI's humanisation quality is found from affective computing that enables computers to understand human emotions (Sunghyun et al 2015;Weerasinghe et al 2014), and Computational humour studies that provides a more relaxing interaction environment (Nijholt 2014;Nijholt et al 2006). Collaboration between researchers from applied and social science is the core enabler for a successful multicultural and multi-ethnic HCI design; however, a seamless integration does not always occur.…”