OpenAmbient : a pervasive access control architecture

For a long time, lack of reliable security and privacy solutions has been considered to be a major hurdle toward the development of pervasive computing applications for critical domains such as secure workplace, healthcare and assisted living. Today, an advanced security infrastructure for context-aware and personalized authentication and authorization services in heterogeneous networks is gradually taking shape. This infrastructure will enable large-scale mobility using a variety of mobile devices supporting authentication modules like SIMs. Also, it will rely on other emergent technologies such as video sensors supporting human posture and face interpretation. In such a scenario, fine-grained ambient information coming from monitoring and surveillance devices is used to enrich context representation underlying advanced access control and security policies. Our research approach is aimed at a service-oriented architecture capable of preserving privacy and protecting resources, including personal user data. Specifically, we put forward the idea of integrating traditional access control models and mechanisms, based on the attributes of the requestor, with the emergent personalization and localization techniques to provide an ambient-aware, service-oriented access control model and language. In this paper we briefly present our Web Service-based architecture, named OpenAmbient, that incorporates a security language supporting ambient predicates.