Adaptative Access Management in 5G IoE using Device Fingerprinting: Discourse, Mechanisms, Challenges, and Opportunities

As we move towards the era of 6G and IoE (Internet of Everything), there is more and more seamless interconnection and interaction among things, people, data, and processes in one intelligent network. In IoE, whether 5G or 6G, the ecosystem embodies a plethora of connected devices and people, user-context heterogeneity, and fully distributed interactions, adding up to a highly complex ecosystem. The 5G will increase cellular bandwidth by huge amounts, making it much easier for the IoE to network large numbers of devices together. Adaptation to the right situational context, especially when it comes to security and protection has become a key requirement for IoE and other complex ecosystems. Especially the Access Control (AC) part is required to be robust, scalable, and resilient (from a security point of view). A dynamic, context-aware security with a breakout from the traditional statically mapped roles and mechanisms is essential today. Robust authentication can be achieved for IoT and IoE using a technique called Device Fingerprinting (DF) that we thoroughly investigate in this paper. We look at the mechanism itself, where and how it applies, and how Access Control (AC) works and scales with DF. We also model the DF generation process and look at different cases with different devices, and the respective overhead incurred by DF compared to the payload as well as the security overhead incurred for different frame sizes and devices as a percentage of the overall traffic (DF and payload combined). All models and assessments provided serve as a basis for future publications based on the continuous ongoing work we are doing in this area.