An Overview of Access Control Mechanisms for Internet of Things

The integration of the physical world and the cyber system in IoT brings significant challenges to the design of security solutions. Access control is considered to be a critical system component for the protection of data, cyberinfrastructure, and even the physical systems in IoT; however, because of the new characteristics of IoT systems, such as the resource constraints, the large scale and the device heterogeneity, many traditional security solutions including existing access control mechanisms may not be directly applicable in IoT environment. This paper first presents an overview of the existing access control mechanisms and analyzes their applicability in IoT systems. Then, both the challenges in the IoT access control design and the goals for future IoT access control design are identified and discussed.