Extended Authorization Mechanism in OSGi

As ubiquitous computing technology evolves, open API that is a solution to interconnect heterogeneous devices and services in a more fluid manner has emerged. Among open API solutions, OSGi is a Java-based service platform that is widely used in the service gateway of home network. In home network environments, the user authentication and authorization associated user´s information and usability may be important security issue. Although the current OSGi support RBAC-based authori-zation, it does not support various facilities in the RBAC model. The access control mechanisms for OSGi proposed so far focus on supporting the RBAC conventions with the basic form of role-user-permission mappings. However, these are difficult to sup-port efficient access control. We propose the extended access control mechanism that includes the concepts of relative role and delegate class. We explain the proposed access control mechan-ism with an example of developing a simple set-top box control service.