Location-Based Access Control Using Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

Location-based applications are an important case within context-awareapplications. They pose interesting challenges when access control isconsidered for they must satisfy requirements arising from the mobilityof both users and resources. Further challenges arise in collaborativeenvironments where resources are shared by users of differentorganizations. In this paper we propose an access control frameworkbased on the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model where users andresources are abstracted as sets of attributes that include theirgeospatial position. In our framework, collaboration is achieved throughthe interoperation of the access control systems of the collaboratingorganizations. We use Semantic Web languages, namely OWL and SPARQL. Weargue that their expressive power can model a wide range of RBACpolicies. In particular, reasoning as provided by OWL supports both astandard enforcement mechanism and interoperation. We have implementedour framework and studied time performance as a function of the numberof users and of the roles they can assume. Our implementation alsofeatures an interface that visually depicts users and resources on amap. As users move around, the set of actions that they can execute onthe resources is shown.