A. Javadi; M. Amini
Abstract
Access control in open and dynamic Pervasive Computing Environments (PCEs) is a very complex mechanism and encompasses various new requirements. In fact, in such environments, context information should be used in access control decision process; however, it is not applicable to gather all context information ...
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Access control in open and dynamic Pervasive Computing Environments (PCEs) is a very complex mechanism and encompasses various new requirements. In fact, in such environments, context information should be used in access control decision process; however, it is not applicable to gather all context information completely and accurately all the time. Thus, a suitable access control model for PCEs not only should be context-aware, but also must be able to deal with imperfect context information. In addition, due to the diversity and heterogeneity of resources and users and their security requirements in PCEs, supporting exception and default policies is a necessary requirement. In this paper, we propose a Semantic-Aware Role-Based Access Control (SARBAC) model satisfying the aforementioned requirements using MKNF+. The main contribution of our work is defining an ontology for context information along with using MKNF+ rules to define context-aware role activation and permission assignment policies. Dividing role activation and permission assignment policies into three layers and using abstract and concrete predicates not only make security policy specification more flexible and manageable, but also make definition of exception and default polices possible. The expressive power of the proposed model is demonstrated through a case study in this paper.
S. Sadat Emami; S. Zokaei
Abstract
Resources and services are accessible in pervasive computing environments from anywhere and at any time. Also, due to ever-changing nature of such environments, the identity of users is unknown. However, users must be able to access the required resources based on their contexts. These and other similar ...
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Resources and services are accessible in pervasive computing environments from anywhere and at any time. Also, due to ever-changing nature of such environments, the identity of users is unknown. However, users must be able to access the required resources based on their contexts. These and other similar complexities necessitate dynamic and context-aware access control models for such environments. In other words, an efficient access control model for pervasive computing environments should be aware of context information. Changes in context information imply some changes in the users' authorities. Accordingly, an access control model for a pervasive computing environment should control all accesses of unknown users to the resources based upon the participating context information, i.e., contexts of the users, resources and the environment. In this paper, a new context-aware access control model is proposed for pervasive computing environments. Contexts are classified into long-term contexts (which do not change during a session) and short-term contexts (which their steady-state period is less than an average time of a session). The model assigns roles to a user dynamically at the beginning of their sessions considering the long-term contexts. However, during a session the active permission set of the assigned roles are determined based on the short-term context conditions. Formal specification of the proposed model as well as the proposed architecture are presented in this paper. Furthermore, by presenting a real case study, it is shown that the model is applicable, decidable, and dynamic. Expressiveness and complexity of the model is also evaluated.