Use of Security Domains in Context-Aware Networks

Provisioning of network-centric context information such as current network load, available services, etc., to hosts, network nodes and users needs to be complemented with an adequate access control in order to preserve the security and privacy requirements of context owners. The gathering, processing and distributing of context information make up the main functionality of the ambient networks information service infrastructure. In this paper we describe the adoption of a security domain framework to control authorised access to the context information collected by such infrastructure. It is anticipated that a balance between performance and guaranteed level of security can be achieved this way. Examples of context retrieval scenarios within and across administrative boundaries are provided. We discuss the relevance of our work with respect to the activities of the IEEE 802.21 standardisation group, namely illustrating how to restrict access to its information services using the security domain concept.