FACT: Functionality-centric access control system for IoT programming frameworks

Improvement in the security and availability is important for the success of the Internet of Things (IoT). Given that recent IoT devices are likely to have multiple functionalities and support third-party applications, this goal becomes challenging to achieve. Through an in-depth investigation of existing IoT frameworks, we focused on two inherent security flaws in their design caused by their device-centric approaches: (1) coarse-grained access control and (2) lack of resource isolation. Because of the coarse-grained access control, IoT devices suffer from over-privileged applications. Furthermore, the lack of resource isolation allows the possibility of Denial-of-Service attacks. In this paper, we propose a functionality-centric approach to managing IoT devices, called FACT, which has two design goals, namely, the principle of least privilege and the availability in terms of device functionalities. FACT isolates each functionality of the device using Linux Containers and grants a subject the privilege to access for each required functionality. We provide the overall framework and detailed working procedures between components that constitute FACT. We built a prototype of FACT on IoTivity and show that it accomplishes secure and efficient linkages between applications and functionalities of IoT devices through analysis and experiments.