Preserving Smart Objects Privacy through Anonymous and Accountable Access Control for a M2M-Enabled Internet of Things

Sensors (Basel). 2015 Jul 1;15(7):15611-39. doi: 10.3390/s150715611.

Abstract

As we get into the Internet of Things era, security and privacy concerns remain as the main obstacles in the development of innovative and valuable services to be exploited by society. Given the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) nature of these emerging scenarios, the application of current privacy-friendly technologies needs to be reconsidered and adapted to be deployed in such global ecosystem. This work proposes different privacy-preserving mechanisms through the application of anonymous credential systems and certificateless public key cryptography. The resulting alternatives are intended to enable an anonymous and accountable access control approach to be deployed on large-scale scenarios, such as Smart Cities. Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms have been deployed on constrained devices, in order to assess their suitability for a secure and privacy-preserving M2M-enabled Internet of Things.

Keywords: Internet of Things; access control; anonymous credential systems; certificateless cryptography; privacy.