Authentication and Authorization in Ambient Assisting Living Applications: An Approach for UniversAAL

Abstract

In recent years the number of Ambient Intelligent systems is growing steadily, especially several fields such as domotic and remote teaching are practical applications of AmI. A relevant characteristic of these systems is sharing a double goal, comfort and simplicity of final users. However, the adoption of these scenarios lacks of a security basis. We defend that security is an essential feature to deploy in any kind of system. Security in conventional systems is a currently unsolved challenge and new attacks and vulnerabilities of systems arise everyday, in AAL systems the problem is even more complex since whether security challenges are hard in homogeneous solutions these escalate when moving to highly dynamic and heterogeneous systems. Several technical solutions have been proposed for specific security components in AAL systems, but the problem to solve the security of the whole system is still open. We address this problem providing a security architecture for the universAAL infrastructure. Among all the different security properties (trust, authenticity, integrity, confidentiality and accountability) we focus on the authorization and authentication, this paper presents a semantic based access control model for universAAL.