A New Location-Aware Authorization Mechanism for Indoor Environments

This work proposes a distributed access control mechanism based on location data and its application in the context of smart buildings. Our approach includes an access control engine embedded into smart objects, which are responsible to make authorization decisions by considering both user location data and access credentials. User location data are estimated using magnetic field data measured and sent by users through their personal phone. The proposed location-aware access control mechanism does not require any additional hardware or intermediate entities, providing the benefits of a decentralized and flexible solution for indoor environments. From the results obtained, we can consider our proposal as an appropriate solution in order to tackle the challenging security requirements of typical pervasive environments.