Capturing context-awareness in access control for pervasive environments

Pervasive computing requires participating services and applications to be non-intrusive and seamless when interacting with users requiring applications to become aware and adapt to the context of an environment. Although awareness is available through contextual information, applications will only gather information that best fits their function. Hence, entities may become unaware of intrusions or conflicts that may or will be occurring, which could affect one's performance, confidentiality, and integrity. We present a context-aware access control model that provides a representation of user and service accesses based on gathered context. The model incorporates users, services, permissions, and activities become the main factors for determining whether access is granted or denied. Based on context constraints, access control policies evolve to fit the security requirements of the active space.