DEAL: A Distributed Authorization Language for Ambient Intelligence

Authorization is an open problem in Ambient Intelligence environments. The difficulty of implementing authorization policies lies in the open and dynamic nature of such environments. The information is distributed among various heterogeneous devices that collect, process, change, and share it. Previous work presented a fully distributed approach for reasoning with conflicts in ambient intelligence systems. This paper extends previous results to address authorization issues in distributed environments. First, the authors present the formal high-level authorization language DEAL to specify access control policies in open and dynamic distributed systems. DEAL has rich expressive power by supporting negative authorization, rule priorities, hierarchical category authorization, and nonmonotonic reasoning. The authors then define the language semantics through Defeasible Logic. Finally, they demonstrate the capabilities of DEAL in a use case Ambient Intelligence scenario regarding a hospital facility.