Location-Based Services Handbook

Chapter 7

Location-Aware Access Control: Scenarios Modeling Approaches, and Selected Issue

Michael Decker

7.1 Introduction

“Access control is the process of mediating every request to resources and data maintained by a[n information] system and determining whether the request should be granted or denied” (Di Vimercati, Paraboschi and Samarati 2003). More formally, this can be expressed as follows:

isAccessAllowed(Subject, Object, Operation) → {true, false}

The parameters of the function isAccessAllowed() have the following meaning:

• “Subject” is an authenticated user of the information system or a computer program working on behalf of a human user. More advanced access control systems will also support “groups,” which are collections of subjects, ...