Resolving Multi-user Conflicts in a Smart Building using RBAC

Abstract

In the world of cyber-physical systems, the emergence of Smart Living Spaces (SLS) trend gives people the opportunity to benefit from new ways of living. Such technological trend that involves several aspects of daily life, allows the residents of the space to better customize and control their environment. SLS emphasizes, mainly, energy conservation, convenience and comfort as well as health care concerns. They are gradually realized in practical applications e.g. household appliances and medical and care systems. The SLS related applications are intended to improve the quality of life for users by ensuring that their needs are met, thereby producing more sustainable use of energy in a given living space. Moreover, the development of SLS technology makes the devices around us “smart”. This has brought lot of challenges, one of which is the access control management. In a SLS, there has to be a robust access control mechanism in place in order to ensure an authorized access to devices. This paper focuses on the use of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model as an efficient means to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to devices in a Smart Building. Then, to guarantee that only the approved users can access the devices, a Smart Building Manager (SBM) is required to ask an evaluation engine to evaluate requests. We separate the evaluation as a third party in the smart building in which we propose RBAC with domains that stands our policy model. We implement the policy model for the aim to ensure a fine grained access control to a smart building application while evolving from a mono-user to a multi-user.