An Approach for Secure Role Assignment

One of the key characteristics of pervasive computing applications is their ability to adapt to their environment. One possible approach to simplify the development of such adaptive applications is to use middleware to automate adaptation decisions. However, in many application scenarios, adaptation decisions can have critical security implications. Thus, when designing middleware to support adaptation it is necessary to take security constraints into account. In previous work, we presented generic role assignment as a middleware abstraction to support adaptation. In contrast to other approaches, role assignment enables adaptation within a single and across multiple smart environments in a flexible, application-overarching manner. In this paper, we extend the concept to support security constraints. Furthermore, we describe the necessary modifications to our existing role assignment system. Finally, we evaluate our approach showing resulting benefits and limitations. In comparison with existing approaches, the proposed approach is more flexible and does not introduce a single point of trust.