Mike White, Brendan Jennings

Adapting Access Rights to the changing profile of user sets present in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland)

A key challenge for the ubiquitous computing community is the development of approaches and systems that will allow users to seamlessly and securely interact with the service rich environment in which they are present. The open nature of many interfaces via which users interact with such environments heightens the need for privacy protection measures. In this paper we describe the M-Zones Access Control (MAC) process which, in addition to providing role based access control and access rights delegation, harnesses context information to automatically re-configure resources in response to changes to the set of users present in the environment. An important feature of the described approach is that it gives users the ability to define individual policies that embody their preferences for resource re-configuration in the presence of other named individuals or individuals with specified roles.