Policy Mapper: A Simplified Approach for Administration of Location-based Access Control Policies

An important issue in mobile computing systems is the administration of locationbased access control policies, particularly the mechanism for specification and enforcement of spatial constraints. Simplifying the administration of such policies requires a mechanism that supports both an intuitive and scalable spatial constraint specification and a flexible enforcement architecture. In this paper, we first motivate the significance of these two requirements, and then present Policy Mapper, an administrative tool that is aimed at simplifying the administration of locationbased access control policies. The premise of Policy Mapper is based on defining access control at a conceptual level and a logical level to carry out the tasks of constraint specification and enforcement, respectively, and designing an interface definition language to allow the coupling of the two levels. The development of Policy Mapper allows us to bridge a critical gap with regards to expressiveness and enforcement of spatial constraints in location-based access control policies.