Towards a Distributed Access Control Model for IoT in Healthcare

Abstract

The rapid growth of the healthcare industry has been revolutionized by the emergence of medical sensors and mobile devices. These technological advances are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) where these devices are interconnected to exchange data to improve the delivery of various medical services including patient monitoring. Although IoT is considered a promising paradigm in healthcare, the security of patients' data is still a significant issue that should be thoroughly addressed. Access control is one of the main security mechanisms that should be applied to healthcare to limit access to patients' data to only authorized individuals. In this paper, we propose a distributed fog-based access control architecture for healthcare. In this design, the access control functions are distributed to bring policy decision and policy information mechanisms to the edges of the network near to the end nodes. This approach increases availability and decreases latency.