The ACAC_D Model for Mutable Activity Control and Chain of Dependencies in Smart and Collaborative Systems

TL;DR

This paper advances activity-centric access control (ACAC) by developing formal models that handle real-time, mutable, and interdependent activities in IoT systems, ensuring secure and efficient management of complex dependencies.

Contribution

It introduces ACAC_D, a family of formal models that explicitly address activity dependencies and their chains, enhancing security modeling in dynamic IoT environments.

Findings

Formal models for activity dependencies in ACAC

Handling of mutable, interdependent activities in real-time

Performance analysis in a smart farming scenario

Abstract

With the integration of connected devices, artificial intelligence, and heterogeneous networks in IoT-driven cyber-physical systems, our society is evolving as a smart, automated, and connected community. In such dynamic and distributed environments, various operations are carried out considering different contextual factors to support the automation of collaborative devices and systems. These devices often perform long-lived operations or tasks (referred to as activities) to fulfill larger goals in the collaborative environment. These activities are usually mutable (change states) and interdependent. They can influence the execution of other activities in the ecosystem, requiring active and real-time monitoring of the entire connected environment. Recently, a vision for activity-centric access control(ACAC) was proposed to enable security modeling and enforcement from the perspective and abstraction of interdependent activities. The proposed ACAC incorporates four decision parameters: Authorizations(A), oBligations(B), Conditions(C), and activity Dependencies(D) for an object agnostic access control in smart systems. In this paper, we take a step further towards maturing ACAC by focusing on activity dependencies(D) and developing a family of formal mathematically grounded models, referred to as ACAC_D. These formal models consider the real-time mutability of activities in resolving active dependencies among various activities in the ecosystem. Activity dependencies can form a chain where it is possible to have dependencies of dependencies. In ACAC, we also consider the chain of dependencies while handling the mutability of an activity. We highlight the challenges while dealing with chain of dependencies, and provide solutions to resolve these challenges. We also present a proof of concept implementation of with performance analysis for a smart farming use case.