Managing Access Control in the Presence of Mobility

The increased pervasiveness of wireless mobile computing devices draws new attention to the need for coordination among small, networked components. The very nature of the environment requires devices to interact even when they meet unpredictably. Because these networks are often decoupled from a fixed infrastructure, reliance on centralized servers for authentication and access policies is impractical. Access control is crucial in such systems, and applications must directly manipulate and examine access policies because they require full control of their data. In this paper, we explore the essential features of general access control policies tailored to the needs of agent coordination in the presence of physical and logical mobility. We propose and evaluate novel constructs to support such policies in mobile applications