A Context-Aware Access Control Framework for Software Services

Abstract

In the present age, context-awareness is an important aspect of the dynamic environments and the different types of dynamic context information bring new challenges to access control systems. Therefore, the need for the new access control frameworks to link their decision making abilities with the context-awareness capabilities have become increasingly significant. The main goal of this research is to develop a new access control framework that is capable of providing secure access to information resources or software services in a context-aware manner. Towards this goal, we propose a new semantic policy framework that extends the basic role-based access control (RBAC) approach with both dynamic associations of user-role and role-service capabilities. We also introduce a context model in modelling the basic and high-level context information relevant to access control. In addition, a situation can be determined on the fly so as to combine the relevant states of the entities and the purpose or user’s intention in accessing the services. For this purpose, we can propose a situation model in modelling the purpose-oriented situations. Finally we need a policy model that will let the users to access resources or services when certain dynamically changing conditions (using context and situation information) are satisfied.