Fine-grained Context-aware Access Control for Smart Devices

While smart devices are becoming a tightly integrated part of our lives, they pose new challenges related to controlling the access to their features. This paper presents a novel fine-grained, context-aware access control solution, based on the ABAC paradigm, that tries to address these challenges. The granularity of the proposed solution allows one to control every single aspect of a smart device independently. The extensible context model and the feature-oriented permission model well integrate with TDeX, our previous proposal of a generic description model for smart devices. The integration of these models extends M4HSD, our middleware infrastructure for smart devices, with access control capabilities and allows it to generate the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) needed to interact with the devices automatically given granted accesses and context information. The GUIs evolve dynamically while contexts and accesses change. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the feasibly of the proposed approach and its innovative characteristics.