TrustAC: Trust-Based Access Control for Pervasive Devices

Alice first meets Bob in an entertainment shop, then, they wish to share multimedia content, but Do they know what are trustworthy users? How do they share such information in a secure way? How do they establish the permissions? Pervasive computing environments originate this kind of scenario, users with their personal devices interacting without need of wires, by forming ad-hoc networks. Such devices considered pervasive are having increasingly faster processors, larger memories and wider communication capabilities, which allows certain autonomy for collaborating and sharing resources. So, they require a suitable access control in order to avoid unauthorised access, or disclosure/modification of relevant information; in general, to protect the data that are usually confidential and the resources. This paper presents a distributed solution for access control, making use of the autonomy and cooperation capability of the devices, since in open dynamic environments is very difficult to depend on central server. The access control is based on a pervasive trust management model from which trust degrees are dynamically obtained. We present the TrustAC reference and functional model, as well as a prototype implementation using XACML-compliant policies.