Access control to people location information

ABSTRACT

Ubiquitous computing uses a variety of information for which access needs to be controlled. For instance, a person's current location is a sensitive piece of information that only authorized entities should be able to learn. Several challenges arise in the specification and implementation of policies controlling access to location information. For example, there can be multiple sources of location information. The sources can be within different administrative domains, which might allow different entities to specify policies, and policies need to be flexible. We address these issues in our design of a distributed access control mechanism for a people location system. Our design encodes policies as digital certificates, which enables decentralized storage of policies. We also present an algorithm for the discovery of distributed certificates. Furthermore, we discuss several privacy issues and show how our design addresses them. To show feasibility of our design, we built an example implementation based on SPKI/SDSI certificates. Using measurements, we quantify the influence of access control on query processing time. We also discuss trade-offs between RSA-based and DSA-based signature schemes for digital certificates.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Access controls

Additional Classification:
  E. Data
  E.3 DATA ENCRYPTION

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.1 Public Policy Issues
          Subjects: Privacy

Keywords:
Certificates, DSA, RSA, SPKI/SDSI, credential discovery, delegation, location, privacy, trust