Enhancing Security of Cloud-based IoT Systems through Network Access Control (NAC)

To bring comfort to human life, reliance on smart devices has increased exponentially. In this digital era, millions of IoT devices are interconnected to store, process, and communicate information with each other. Nowadays, IoT devices are being used regularly in healthcare, education, agriculture, transportation, smart homes, smart cities, defense forces, etc. The use of these devices is, however, strained due to limited resources in terms of storage, computation, and processing. Therefore, resource-intensive encryption algorithms cannot be executed to ensure the security of information. To overcome the limitations, cloud computing as a resource-rich technology may be integrated with IoT devices for maximizing output and utility. However, many security concerns arise after the integration of cloud computing and IoT devices. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel approach i.e. NAC to provide strong access control and authorization mechanism for cloud-based IoT systems. A three-layered architecture i.e. IoT devices layer, Authentication layer, and Cloud computing layer have been presented. The NAC has been used on the authentication layer and cloud layer to enhance the security of a Cloud-based IoT system. Our proposed solution can minimize the chances of multiple attacks that are faced by cloud-based IoT systems.