Adaptive Secure Access to Remote Services in Mobile Environments

Since the inception of service-oriented computing paradigm, we have witnessed a plethora of services deployed across a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from conventional RPC-based services to SOAP-based Web services. Likewise, the proliferation of mobile devices has enabled the remote "on the move" access of these services from anywhere at any time. Secure access to these services is challenging especially in a mobile computing environment with heterogeneous modalities. Conventional static access control mechanisms are not able to accommodate complex secure access requirements. In this paper, we propose an adaptive secure access mechanism to address this problem. Our mechanism consists of two components: an adaptive access control module and an adaptive function invocation module. It not only adapts access control policies to diverse requirements, but also introduces function invocation adaptation during access, which is the missing part of existing access control models. We have successfully applied the proposed adaptive secure access mechanism to a computer-assisted surgery application called UbiCAS. Performance evaluation shows that with limited overhead, our technique enforces secure access to the services provided by the UbiCAS system in a flexible way.