Context-Aware Trust-Based Access Control for Ubiquitous Systems

Context-awareness is a quintessential feature of ubiquitous computing. Contextual information not only facilitates improved applications, but can also become significant security parameters – which in turn can potentially ensure service delivery not to anyone anytime anywhere, but to the right person at the right time and place. Specially, in determining access control to resources, contextual information can play an important role. Access control models, as studied in traditional computing security, however, have no notion of context-awareness; and the recent works in the nascent field of context-aware access control predominantly focus on spatio-temporal contexts, disregarding a host of other pertinent contexts. In this paper, with a view to exploring the relationship of access control and context-awareness in ubiquitous computing, the authors propose a comprehensive context-aware access control model for ubiquitous healthcare services. They explain the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed model in detail. They chose healthcare as a representative application domain because healthcare systems pose an array of non-trivial context-sensitive access control requirements, many of which are directly or indirectly applicable to other context-aware ubiquitous computing applications.

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SYLPH

International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence ◽

10.4018/jaci.2011040101 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 1-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ricardo S. Alonso ◽

Dante I. Tapia ◽

Juan M. Corchado

Keyword(s):

Wireless Sensor Networks ◽

Sensor Networks ◽

Ambient Intelligence ◽

Wireless Sensor ◽

Context Aware ◽

Preliminary Results ◽

Ubiquitous Systems ◽

Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks ◽

Innovative Solutions ◽

Flexible Applications

The significance that Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has acquired in recent years requires the development of innovative solutions. In this sense, the development of AmI-based systems requires the creation of increasingly complex and flexible applications. The use of context-aware technologies is an essential aspect in these developments in order to perceive stimuli from the context and react upon it autonomously. This paper presents SYLPH, a novel platform that defines a method for integrating dynamic and self-adaptable heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). This approach facilitates the inclusion of context-aware capabilities when developing intelligent ubiquitous systems, where functionalities can communicate in a distributed way. A WSN infrastructure has been deployed for testing and evaluating this platform. Preliminary results and conclusions are presented in this paper.

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