An Access Control Architecture for Distributing Trust in Pervasive Computing Environments

Pervasive computing infrastructure is highly distributed and it is essential to develop security mechanisms that enhance the security of the system by distributing trust among the various infrastructure components. We present a novel access control architecture explicitly designed to distribute trust that combines threshold cryptography, multi-layer encryption, and mediated access to contextual data to support dynamically changing access control permissions. We present several models of our access control infrastructure and evaluate how well each design distributes trust and limits the behavior of misbehaving components. We also simulate the behavior of our threshold based access control scheme and evaluate the overhead of each infrastructure model.