Adaptive access control in coordination-based mobile agent systems

The increased pervasiveness of mobile devices like cell phones, PDAs, and laptops draws attention to the need for coordination among these networked devices. The very nature of the environment requires devices to interact opportunistically when resources are available. Such interactions occur unpredictably as device users have no advance knowledge of others they will encounter. The openness of these environments also requires users to protect themselves and their data from unwanted interactions while maintaining desired, yet unscripted, coordination. As the ubiquity of communicating mobile devices increases, the number of applications supported by the network grows drastically and managing access control is crucial to such systems. Application agents must directly manipulate and examine access policies because these networks are often decoupled from a fixed infrastructure, rendering reliance on centralized servers for authentication and access policies impractical. In this paper, we explore context-aware access control policies tailored to the needs of agent coordination in open environments that exhibit mobility. We propose and evaluate novel constructs to support such policies, especially in the presence of large numbers of highly dynamic application agents.