Challenges and Opportunities in Applying Semantics to Improve Access Control in the Field of Internet of Things

The increased number of IoT devices results in continuously generated massive amounts of raw data. Parts of this data are private and highly sensitive as they reflect owner’s behavior, obligations, habits, and preferences. In this paper, we point out that flexible and comprehensive access control policies are “a must” in the IoT domain. The Semantic Web technologies can address many of the challenges that the IoT access control is facing with today. Therefore, we analyze the current state of the art in this area and identify the challenges and opportunities for improved access control in a semantically enriched IoT environment. Applying semantics to IoT access control opens a lot of opportunities, such as semantic inference and reasoning, easy data sharing, data trading, new approaches to authentication, security policies based on a natural language and enhances the interoperability using a common ontology.