Annotation-Based Access Control Approach for Ubiquitous Systems

With the growing production and access of resources managed by sensor-rich ubiquitous devices, such as photos, videos, and services, critical issues arise from access control point of view. Sensor-rich devices offer users new opportunities for creating, accessing, and sharing resources from anywhere and at anytime, interacting dynamically with other surrounding devices, users, and the environment. In this scenario, resources could be automatically annotated with information characterizing situations (context) to facilitate retrieval, organization, and enrichment of their contents. Moreover, resources may be available by users only on a specific situation (e.g., location and season), such as surveys asking visitors about touristic attractions while visiting them. However, existing ubiquitous applications do not exploit contextual and social annotation as central concept for defining access control policies to protect resources. Therefore, this paper proposes a context-aware rule-based access control model for protecting ubiquitous resources, presenting a prototype that implements this model, a case study based on an ubiquitous survey application, as well as performance evaluation results that demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed solution.