A Semantic Context-Based Access Control Model for Pervasive Computing Environments

Abstract

In pervasive computing environment, computing devices and applications can easily interoperate each other and interact with human activities by context-awareness. Therefore, it is necessary to have a formal representation that represents semantics of the contexts, reflects the change of the situation, and can be shared and understood by system security policies. Traditional security policy and subject-based access control mechanisms are inadequate in such an environment. So this paper presents a semantic context-based access control model (SCBAC) which adopts OWL-based ontologies to express context/policy and SWRL rules to express context-aware access control policies. The proposed model adopts a context-centric policy method, and grants permissions to users according to current context information and allows high-level description and reasoning about contexts and policies.