Toward exploiting location-based and video information in negotiated access control policies

As the global information infrastructure is becoming more and more ubiquitous, digital business transactions are increasingly performed using a variety of mobile devices and across multiple communication channels. In this new paradigm of pervasive access, a much richer context representation regarding both users and the resources they access could be available to applications, potentially supporting highly expressive and intelligent policies regulating access and fruition. On the other hand, checking advanced context-related information when evaluating a policy involves several unsolved research issues, often due to underlying technology. Predicates representing users position and posture (e.g., as shown in a video feed), for instance, are semantically different from traditional ones inasmuch their outcome is both highly dynamic and uncertain. The aim of this work is twofold: (i) presenting some of our recent work in dynamic context representation, including data streams encoding users location and video images. (ii) discussing the integration of dynamic context representation within current approaches to negotiated access control in a mobile environment.