Multiparty access control in edge computing

Project Title:

Supervisor(s):

Dr. Fatemeh Javidan, Dr Amin Heidarpour (Monash University), Prof. Riadh Al-Mahaidi (Swinburne University)

Supervisors:

Alireza Jolfaei, Iqbal Gondal, Venki Balasubramanian

Contact person and email address:

Alireza Jolfaei a.jolfaei@federation.edu.au

A brief description of the project:

In a large-scale network such as a building or a city-block, the utility of the network is normally monitored and controlled by an edge controller that receives a massive stream of data from heterogeneous, resource-constrained IoT devices. Given such a multi-party environment, it is crucial to support a flexible and powerful access control regime across the data and information generated by each party. A suitable access control becomes essential whenever the service provider needs to work with data coming from multiple edge controllers. In practice, rich and monetisable services would invariably require such collaborations; yet each party needs to ensure that it does not give away data and information any more than necessary for the service. For example, the local police in a city neighbourhood may be interested in purchasing a service that provides audio/video streams of accidents, whereas the city traffic department is only interested in data concerning traffic congestion and intersection safety. In this example, the local police and city traffic department are two end-customers of the edge services and willing to pay for them. Each of these services may be contracted through a service aggregator party that then coordinates with the edge controllers to provide the service. The purpose of this project is to devise mechanisms to define fine-grain access control over data streams that the parties can exploit to provide access control and a way of monetising the accesses by other parties.