Context Awareness for Adaptive Access Control Management in IoT Environments

In addition to traditional security challenges, the heterogeneity, dynamicity, and variability/unpredictability of IoT environments push for innovative and adaptive security solutions. It is becoming clear that they should be capable of dynamically adapting security mechanisms and policies to achieve the best dynamic trade-off between overhead/costs and appropriate security levels, by possibly considering also the associated risks. To this purpose, we claim that context awareness should be a first-class principle guiding the design/development of efficient/effective adaptive security solutions for the IoT. The chapter focuses on the requirements and solutions toward context-aware and adaptive access control for IoT environments. After sketching the primary open challenges for IoT security and providing an in-depth state of the art of related access control solutions, the chapter extensively motivates the adoption of context awareness for adaptiveness via practical examples coming from the emerging literature in the field and from our experience of adaptive context-aware access control in Proteus.