Implementing Usage Control in Internet of Things: A Smart Home Use Case

Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm which has become extremely popular, with applications spanning from e-health to industrial controls. IoT architectures are distributed and often based on constrained devices, which make challenging the task of introducing security mechanisms, in particular those requiring dynamic policy evaluation. In this paper we present UCIoT (Usage Control in IoT), a fault tolerant and adaptable framework for the enforcement of usage control policies in IoT environments. UCIoT brings the functionalities of a U-XACML-based usage control framework on a decentralized, distributed and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture. In the present work, we describe an application of UCIoT in a Smart-Home environment, presenting also two possible use cases where usage control is exploited to implement a policy for energy saving and a policy for safety. A set of experiments on real devices is finally presented to report the performance of the system, measuring the overhead introduced by the UCIoT framework.