Access Control Models for Pervasive Environments: A Survey

Pervasive computing is a concept in computer science where computing appear everywhere and anywhere, the devices are heterogeneous and may belong to different domains, and they interact with each other to provide smart services. Traditional access control models such as DAC, MAC and RBAC are not suitable to this environment. Therefore, we need more flexible, dynamic and generic access control models for controlling access to such environments. There have been many proposals proposed to address the new security requirements in the pervasive computing environments. The goal of this paper is to review and analyze the existing proposals seen in literature and to compare the approaches taken in these proposals based on the security requirements. This comparison will lead to the identification of some research gaps that require further investigation.