What is Access Control (AC)

Access control in the domain of information system security refers to the process of deciding whether a particular request made by a user to perform a particular operation on a particular object under the control of the system should be allowed or denied. For example, the access control component of a file server might have to decide whether user “Alice” is allowed to perform the operation “delete” on the object “document.txt”. For traditional access control this decision is based on the evaluation of the identity of the user and attributes of the object. The novel idea of location-aware access control is also to consider the user’s current location which is determined by a location system like GPS. The main purpose of this article is to present several approaches for the modeling of location-aware access control rules. We consider generic as well as application-specific access control models that can be found in literature.