A three tier access control architecture for IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) based networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made a successful impact on our personal and professional life. More specifically, the internet of medical things (IoMT) is capturing a crucial role in improving healthcare and providing medical facilities to human-being worldwide. Different smart sensors are connected to patients and transfer important data to the healthcare system to monitor and provide better patient treatment. As a result, the number of users is increasing drastically. Connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be 52.2 billion by 2022. Although IoMT is counted as a promising apart in healthcare, the security of patients’ information is still a challenging issue that should be thoroughly addressed. Access control is one of the leading security mechanisms introduced to healthcare to limit access to patients’ information to only authorised individuals. In healthcare, access to the medical record of patient’s within a minimal time is also extremely important because less time maybe save a life. In this research, we design an access control architecture (ACA). That uses a hybrid approach by combining a fine-grained attribute-based access control model (ACM), role-based access control model (RBAC), Capability-based access control model (CBAC), and using fog computing. Fog computing is a new era of cloud computing that provides computation, storage, and application services to end-users. This implemented schema is eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) driven. Our designed architecture reduces the existing processing time and the number of policies. We have emulated a testbed, provided a performance evaluation of our architecture, and made it compatible for practical use.