Toward autonomically composable and context-dependent access control specification through ensembles

Dynamicity and context dependence are some of the key properties of autonomic component systems that include a large spectrum of today’s modern smart systems. In these systems, components dynamically re-group themselves, interact and collaborate in an ad hoc fashion to collectively cope with situations in their environment. Though security and access control become the key concerns of these systems, the high degree of dynamicity and the potential open-endedness is incompatible with the traditional approaches to access control, which typically rely on static hierarchies of roles and a static assignment of roles. To address this problem, we formulate access control rules which allow for dynamic ad hoc collaboration at runtime and which follow the dynamicity and context dependence of the autonomic components. Based on our previous work with autonomic component ensembles, we show how the concepts of ensembles can be extended and exploited to define the access control rule to govern interactions in a system of autonomic components.