AC4E: An Access Control Model for Emergencies of Mission-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems

Access control is an essential security component in protecting sensitive data and services from unauthorized access to the resources in mission-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). CPSs are different from conventional information processing systems in such that they involve interactions between the cyber world and the physical world. Therefore, existing access control models cannot be used directly and even become disabled in an emergency situation. This paper proposes an adaptive Access Control model for Emergences (AC4E) for mission-critical CPSs. The principal aim of AC4E is to control the criticalities in these systems by executing corresponding responsive actions. AC4E not only provides the ability to control access to data and services in normal situations, but also grants the correct set of access privileges, at the correct time, to the correct set of subjects in emergency situations. It can facilitate adaptively responsive actions altering the privileges to specific subjects in a proactive manner without the need for any explicit access requests. A semiformal validation of the AC4E model is presented, with respect to responsiveness, correctness, safety, non-repudiation and concurrency, respectively. Then a case study is given to demonstrate how the AC4E model detects, responds, and controls the emergency events for a typical CPS adaptively in a proactive manner. Eventually, a wide set of simulations and performance comparisons of the proposed AC4E model are presented.