The sharing of data is becoming increasingly important for the process and manufacturing industries that are using data-driven models and advanced analysis to assess production performance and make predictions, e.g., on wear and tear. In such environments, access to data needs to be accurately controlled to prevent leakage to unauthorized users while providing easy to manage policies. Data should further be shared with users outside trusted domains using encryption. Finally, means for revoking access to data are needed. This paper provides a survey on attribute-based approaches for access control to data, focusing on policy management and enforcement. We aim to identify key properties provided by attribute-based access control (ABAC) and attribute-based encryption (ABE) that can be combined and used to meet the abovementioned needs. We describe such possible combinations in the context of a proposed architecture for secure data sharing. The paper concludes by identifying knowledge gaps to provide direction to future research on attribute-based approaches for secure data sharing in industrial contexts.

KEYWORDS: IoT, access control, NGAC, fine-grained, attribute-based, encryption.