Flexible authorization in home network environments

In home network environments, OSGi platform plays a major role as the service gateway to access into home appliances. It is important to provide appropriate services as well as security mechanisms to protect confidential or sensitive information and devices. Authorization is especially important when controlling the access of different users. OSGi platform supports the role based access control but it does not support various facilities in the RBAC model. To address such shortcomings, several works have proposed the enhanced access control mechanisms for the OSGi service platform. However, these are still limited to applying the traditional RBAC conventions to OSGi platform. This paper extends the existing authorization mechanism of OSGi platform to address its limitations for dynamic deployments. By adding the relative role concept and activating the access control using the delegation model, proposed mechanism enables a diverse and outstanding access control. We implement the proposed mechanism using aspectJ and illustrate how to develop a bundle including access control logic.