RiBAC: Role Interaction Based Access Control Model for Community Computing

Community computing is an agent-based development paradigm for ubiquitous computing systems. In a community computing system, ubiquitous services are provided by cooperation among agents. While agents cooperate, they interact with each other continuously to access data of other agents and/or to execute other agent’s actions. However, in cases of security-critical ubiquitous services such as medical or military services, an access control mechanism is necessary to prevent unauthorized access to critical data or action. In this paper, we propose a family of Role interaction Based Access Control (RiBAC) models for Community Computing, by extending the existing RBAC model to consider role interactions. As a basic model, we propose the core RiBAC model. For the convenience of management and to provide more fine-grained access control, we propose Hierarchical RiBAC (H-RiBAC), Constrained RiBAC (C-RiBAC), and Constrained Hierarchical RiBAC (CH-RiBAC) models. Finally, we extend the existing community computing framework to accommodate the specification and enforcement of RiBAC policies.