Towards trusted data sharing and access control

The growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has massively increased the volume of data available for analysis. This data can be used to get detailed and precise insights about users, products, and organizations. Traditionally, organizations collect and process this data separately, which is a slow process and requires significant resources. Over the past decade, data sharing has become a popular trend, where several organizations have engaged in sharing their collected data with other organizations and processing it together for analysis. Digital marketplaces are developed to facilitate this data sharing. These marketplaces connect producers and consumers of data while ensuring that the data can be shared inside and outside the organization seamlessly and securely. This is achieved by implementing a fine-grained and efficient data access control method that restricts access to the data for authorized parties only. The data generated by IoT devices is voluminous, continuous, and heterogeneous. Therefore, traditional access control methods are no longer suitable for managing access to this data in a digital marketplace. IoT data requires an access control model, which can handle large volumes of streaming data, and provides full control transparency of data access to IoT device owners. In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a novel access control mechanism for a data distribution system developed by Nokia Bell Labs. We have outlined the requirements for designing an access control system to manage data access for data shared across multiple heterogeneous organizations. We have evaluated the proposed system to assess the feasibility and performance of the system in various scenarios. The thesis also discusses the strengths and limitations of the proposed system and highlights future research perspectives in this domain. We expect this thesis to be helpful for researchers studying IoT data processing, access control methods for streaming (big) data, and digital marketplaces