Cremonezi et al., 2020

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) encompasses a large number of connected devices, generating and sharing different types of data among themselves. These data enable the creation of society-changing applications, such as health monitoring and autonomous vehicles. Under this context, protecting the access of these connected devices and their data is critical to IoT applications’ success, since a single data breach can incur into a cascade effect, which leads to devastating consequences. Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems provide mechanisms to identify individuals at the network and determine their access privileges, thus avoiding inappropriate access. However, the current IAMs system struggles to provide the scale or manage the complex relationships that IoT brings. In this work, we present a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of IAMs and the main concepts and challenges when applied to IoT. First, we overview the IoT technology, giving its essential characteristics and communication architectures and its main applications. Then, we present IAMs state-of-the-art and the main concepts, existing architectures, and challenges. Finally, we focus on current IAMs that aims to tackle the IoT complexity, along with an in-depth analysis of their proposals and future directions in the field.