Enhancing Security of Cloud Based IoT Systems Through Network Access Control (NAC) - Khan, Awais; Supervisor Dr. Shahzaib Tahir (Rawalpindi MCS, NUST, 2023)
To bring comfort to human life, reliance on smart devices has increased exponentially. In this digital era, millions of IoT devices are interconnected to store, process, and communicate information with each other. Presently, IoT devices are being used regularly in healthcare, education, agriculture, transportation, smart homes, smart cities and defense forces, etc. The use of these devices is, however, strained due to limited resources in terms of storage, computation, and processing. Therefore, resource-intensive encryption algorithms cannot be effectively utilised to ensure the security of information. To overcome the limitations, cloud computing as a resource-rich technology may be integrated with IoT devices to maximize output and utility. However, many security concerns arise after the amalgamation of cloud computing and IoT devices. This study proposes a novel approach, i.e., NAC, to provide robust access control and authorization mechanism for cloud-based IoT systems that can also mitigate multiple threats to cloud-based IoT systems. This study presents a three-layered architecture, i.e., IoT devices layer, authentication layer, and cloud computing layer. A novel solution NAC has been used on the authentication layer and cloud layer (as per organization size and requirement) to enhance the security of a cloud-based IoT system. Our proposed solution provides access control mechanism to cloud-based IoT systems that can also minimize the chances of multiple attacks that are faced by cloud-based IoT systems.
Keywords: MSIS