Authentication and Access Control for Open Messaging Interface Standard

Abstract

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) vendors is rapidly growing, providing solutions for all levels of the IoT stack. Despite the universal agreement on the need for a standardized technology stack, following the model of the world-wide-web, a large number of industry-driven domain specific standards hinder the development of a single IoT ecosystem. An attempt to solve this challenge is the introduction of O-MI (Open Messaging Interface) and O-DF (Open Data Format), two domain independent standards published by Open Group. Despite their good compatibility, they define no specific security model. This paper takes the first step of defining a security model for these standards by proposing suitable access control and authentication mechanisms that can regulate the rights of different principles and operations defined in these standards. First, a brief introduction is provided of the O-MI and O-DF standards, including a comparison with existing standards. Second, the envisioned security model is presented, together with the implementation details of the plug-in module developed for the O-MI and O-DF reference implementation.