Towards Role-Based Authorization for OSGi Service Environments

OSGi framework enables diverse devices to conveniently establish a local area network environment such as homes, offices, and automobiles. Access control is one of the crucial parts which should be considered in such emerging environments. However, the current OSGi authorization mechanism is not rigorous enough to fulfill security requirements involved in dynamic and open OSGi environments. This paper provides a systematic way to adopt a role-based access control approach in OSGi environments. We demonstrate how our authorization framework can achieve important RBAC features and enhance existing primitive access control modules in OSGi service environments.