Towards shrink-wrapped security: A taxonomy of security-relevant context

The emerging mobile computing paradigm makes it feasible for workers to access corporate resources anytime and anywhere. While ubiquitous access has its benefits, it creates unique challenges for maintaining the security of these resources - challenges that traditional, context-insensitive approaches to security are not appropriate to handle. We propose the notion of shrink-wrapped security, in which a tight coupling is provided between a user's situation and security. In order to support shrink-wrapped security, a more comprehensive notion of context than what is currently used by context-aware security systems is necessary. This paper presents a first step towards achieving shrink-wrapped security by addressing a key challenge that developers of context-aware systems face…identifying relevant context.