Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2004-03-15

Filename

wucse-2004-11.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCSE-2004-11

Abstract

The increased pervasiveness of wireless mobile com-puting devices draws new attention to the need for coor-dination among small networked components. The very nature of the environment requires devices to interact opportunistically when resources are available. Such interactions occur unpredictably as mobile agents gen-erally have no advance knowledge of other agents they will encounter over the lifetime of the application. In addition, as the ubiquity of communicating mobile de-vices increases, the number of application agents sup-ported by the network grows drastically. Managing ac-cess control is crucial to such systems, and applica-tion agents must directly manipulate and examine ac-cess policies because the agents require full control over their data. However, because these networks are of-ten decoupled from a fixed infrastructure, reliance on centralized servers for authentication and access poli-cies is impractical. In this paper, we explore the essen-tial features of general access control policies tailored to the needs of agent coordination in the presence of physical and logical mobility. This access mechanism derives much of its flexibility and expressiveness from its ability to take into account context information. We propose and evaluate novel constructs to support such policies, especially in the presence of large numbers of highly dynamic application agents.

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7S180VZ

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