A framework for access control and management in dynamic cooperative and federated environments

Personal devices can form a person-centric network, which is known as a Personal Network (PN). Besides person-oriented communications, there is a growing tendency for group-oriented communications, since it enables the users to enjoy cooperation and promises exciting opportunities for different applications in various fields, such as, entertainment, business healthcare, emergency and education. A Federation of PNs (Fednet) is a group-oriented network that enables the users to federate their personal networks and to share personal resources and services to achieve a common objective. One of the challenges in Fednets is managing a secure dynamic cooperation of PNs. In this paper, we present a secure access control and management framework for Fednets. The framework is based on the two-level approach to the access control: the access to the Fednet and the access to Fednet resources and services. The access control contains authentication, authorization and token granting processes. Furthermore, in this paper, we describe our initial prototyping experience of this framework. Preliminary results showed that the approach is suitable for Fednets of small sizes and therefore, further work is required to investigate the scalability issues. Finally, we briefly discuss the related work.