The Context-Security Nexus in Ubiquitous Computing

Context-awareness is a quintessential feature of ubiquitous computing. Contextual information not only facilitates improved applications, but can also become significant security parameters – which in turn can potentially ensure service delivery not to anyone anytime anywhere, but to the right person at the right time and place. Specially, in determining access control to resources, contextual information can play an important role. Access control models, as studied in traditional computing security, however, have no notion of context-awareness; and the recent works in the nascent field of context-aware access control predominantly focus on spatio-temporal contexts, disregarding a host of other pertinent contexts. In this paper, with a view to exploring the relationship of access control and context-awareness in ubiquitous computing, the authors propose a comprehensive context-aware access control model for ubiquitous healthcare services. They explain the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed model in detail. They chose healthcare as a representative application domain because healthcare systems pose an array of non-trivial context-sensitive access control requirements, many of which are directly or indirectly applicable to other context-aware ubiquitous computing applications.