Leveraging Ontologies upon a Holistic Privacy-Aware Access Control Model

Access control is a crucial concept in both ICT security and privacy, providing for the protection of system resources and personal data. The increasing complexity of nowadays systems has led to a vast family of solutions fostering comprehensive access control models, with the ability to capture a variety of parameters and to incorporate them in the decision making process. However, existing approaches are characterised by limitations regarding expressiveness. We present an approach that aims at overcoming such limitations. It is fully based on ontologies and grounded on a rich in semantics information model. The result is a privacy-aware solution that takes into consideration a variety of aspects and parameters, including attributes, context, dependencies between actions and entities participating therein, as well as separation and binding of duty constraints.