A Service Access Control Framework for a Sensor Service Architecture

Sensor and earth observation data are becoming more and more available through service networks. In order to provide operational services, reliable and easy to use mechanisms for security, authentication and distributed access control are vital for service providers when offering their services. This paper describes a Service Access Control (SAC) framework which was developed as part of the SANY project, a project of the 6th European Framework Program (FP6) which has developed a reference model and service architecture for sensor service networks. The result of this work is the CHARON Service Access Control Framework, which aims at overcoming the major problems identified in the analysis. This paper describes the overall functionality of the SANY SAC framework, its implementation CHARON and its key components.