Context-aware usage control for web of things

The Web of Things (WoT), inherited from the Internet of Things (IoT), encapsulates functionalities into publishable services on the Web to enable the IoT a seamless integration with the Web. The openness of the Web, in turn, directly exposes WoT to existing attacks from the Web. In addition, WoT possesses characteristics of high security and privacy concerns, mobility, and limited capabilities, which require specific and additional security and privacy protection beyond existing mechanisms. More importantly, WoT is inherently connected to its context, so context information must be taken into account in its security and privacy measures. To address these challenges, we propose a context-aware usage control model (ConUCON), which leverages the context information to enhance data, resource, and service protection for WoT. On the basis of ConUCON, we also design and implement a context-aware usage control framework on the middleware layer in our ongoing SmartHome project, to provide security and privacy protection. ConUCON is designed specifically to express the context-aware usage policy specification, such that security and privacy requirements can be easily specified and enforced with the proposed model and framework. Finally, we apply ConUCON to a remote appliance management prototype, as a case study, to demonstrates its feasibility in a real environment. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.