Access Control to Information in Pervasive Computing Environments

Many types of information available in a pervasive computing environment, such as people location information, should be accessible only by a limited set of people. Some properties of the information raise unique challenges for the design of an access control mechanism: Information can emanate from more than one source, it might change its nature or granularity before reaching its final receiver, and it can flow through nodes administrated by different entities. We propose three design principles for the architecture of an access control mechanism: (1) extract pieces of information in raw data streams early, (2) define policies controlling access at the information level, and (3) exploit information relationships for access control. We describe an example architecture in which we apply these principles. We also report how our earlier work about adding access control to a people location service contributed to the more general access control architecture proposed here.