A multimedia access control language for virtual and ambient intelligence environments

Access control models are becoming increasingly important in several application domains especially in distributed environments like those addressed by Web Services. Established approaches such as DAC [16] , MAC [16] RBAC [11, 12, 22] and others [6, 5, 15, 1] suggest representing users in different ways (labels, roles, credentials, etc.) in order to facilitate the association of authorization and access control policies. In intelligent and virtual ambient applications, users exist in a controlled environment equipped with multimedia sensors such as cameras and microphones, and use their terminals in several application environments. In this paper, we study the problem of integrating multimedia objects into access control models and particularly role-based ones. Here, we describe a Multimedia Access Control Language (M 2ACL) in which users and roles are described by using sets of mul- timedia objects,greatly increasing the flexibility of access control policies and their applicability to virtual and ambient intelligence (AmI) environments. We address potential risks related to the use of multimedia objects by defining the concept of filter functions used to aggregate a set of values into a relevant one.Finally,we present a set of functional specification and the experiments conducted to validate the proposed approach.