CtRBAC: Context-Related Role-Based Access Control Mechanism on Android Smartphone

Abstract

Smartphones are more and more gaining popularity, creating novel application areas as their capabilities increase in terms of computational power, sensors and communication. Emerging new features of mobile applications and devices give opportunity to new threats. As a result, research addressing information access in smartphones environment has proliferated. The important feature of smartphones is to restrict the behavior of users using applications and services to a certain level and the existing access control mechanism on smartphones mostly holds a coarse-grained. This paper proposes how role-based access control mechanism has motivated the creation of finegrained access control mechanism. In this paper, a finer access control mechanism which is called context-related role based access control (CtRBAC) is presented. CtRBAC is based on traditional role based access control by incorporating with the contextual information of user and system environment. CtRBAC categorizes the mobile phone users according to their access rights of device’s resources and services. By using simple policy and context, the system fulfills necessity of existing access control mechanism.