A Semantic Context-Aware Access Control Framework for Secure Collaborations in Pervasive Computing Environments

Abstract

Abstract. Wireless connectivity and widespread diffusion of portable devices offer novel opportunities for users to share resources anywhere and anytime, and to form ad-hoc coalitions. Resource access control is crucial to leverage these ad-hoc collaborations. In pervasive scenarios, however, collaborating entities cannot be predetermined and resource availability frequently varies, even unpredictably, due to user/device mobility, thus complicating resource access control. Access control policies cannot be defined based on entity's identities/roles, as in traditional access control solutions, or be specified a priori to face any operative run time condition, but require continuous adjustments to adapt to the current situation. To address these issues, this paper advocates the adoption of novel access control policy models that follow two main design guidelines: context-awareness to control resource access on the basis of context visibility and to enable dynamic adaptation of policies depending on context changes, and semantic technologies for context/policy specification to allow high-level description and reasoning about context and policies. The paper also describes the design of a semantic context-aware policy model that adopts ontologies and rules to express context and context-aware access control policies and supports policy adaptation.

OWL 2 modeling and reasoning with complex human activities

“…On the contrary, in loosely-coupled solutions, rule-based and ontological reasoning are executed separately. For instance, in [20,21,22,35,36] the interaction between ontological and rule-based reasoning is given by the possibility to define rules whose preconditions involve ontology-based context data derived by ontological reasoning.…”

ICAF: A Context-Aware Framework for Access Control

“…The GEO-RBAC model [5] also extends the RBAC model, where authorizations to access resources are based on the assigned role and location of the user. Toninelli et al [6] have proposed a contextaware access control framework that provides resource access permission based on such factors as resources availability, actor roles/identities and environmental conditions (such as time, other available resources, etc.). These existing research efforts either consider only specific types of context information or do not provide a classification of the relevant contextual factors for access control.…”

“…The traditional access control models (e.g., [3]) do not provide adequate functionality to adapt to and incorporate dynamically changing contexts. More recently, a number of research efforts (e.g., [4][5][6]) have attempted to design access control models that consider context information, focusing on time and location. In general, there are also other types of environmental factors or context information that need to be considered.…”

Middleware for Pervasive Spaces: Balancing Privacy and Utility

“…Using Semantics Web technologies as means for describing and reasoning about privacy policies in different domains including pervasive environments are becoming common [41,20]. Relevant to our privacy policy language is the semantic context-aware policy model based on Description Logic (DL) ontologies and Logic Programming (LP) rules in [41].…”