A Negotiation Scheme for Access Rights Establishment in Autonomic Communication

Autonomic computing and communication has become a new paradigm for dynamic service integration and resource sharing in today’s ambient networks. Devices and systems need to dynamically collaborate and federate with little known or even unknown parties in order to perform everyday tasks. Those devices and systems act as independent nodes that autonomously manage and enforce their own security policies. Thus in autonomic pervasive communications clients may not know a priori what access rights they need in order to execute a service nor service providers know a priori what credentials and privacy requirements clients have so that they can take appropriate access decisions. To solve this problem we propose a negotiation scheme that protects security and privacy interests with respect to information disclosure while still providing effective access control to services. The scheme proposes a negotiation protocol that allows entities in a network to mutually establish sufficient access rights needed to grant a service