PO-SAAC: A Purpose-Oriented Situation-Aware Access Control Framework for Software Services

Situation-aware applications need to capture relevant context information and user intention or purpose, to provide situation-specific access to software services. As such, a situation-aware access control approach coupled with purpose-oriented information is of critical importance. Existing approaches are highly domain-specific and they control access to services depending on the specific types of context information without considering the purpose. To achieve situation-aware access control, in this paper we consider purpose-oriented situations rather than conventional situations (e.g., user’s state). We take situation to mean the states of the entities and the states of the relationships between entities that are relevant to the purpose of a resource access request. We propose a generic framework, P urpose- O riented S ituation- A ware A ccess C ontrol, that supports access control to software services based on the relevant situations. We develop a software prototype to demonstrate the practical applicability of the framework. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through a healthcare case study. Experimental results demonstrate the satisfactory performance of our framework.