Access Control for Next-Generation Systems

Status

This project started in Spring 2012 and is ongoing.

Researchers

• Prof. Dr. David Basin
• Dr. Srdjan Marinovic
  
• Petar Tsankov
  

Description

Modern physical access control systems indicate a trend of abandoning traditional physical keys and moving towards contactless, Internet-based access media  solutions. In recent years, access control systems have vastly benefited from formal languages, which divorce a policy specification from an actual PDP implementation. The emerging access control systems will allow for previously impossible use cases. For example, a person can book a hotel room and access it directly using a smart-phone, without having to queue at the reception desk. The  increased complexity of these systems in combination with the high-security  requirements of security critical areas such as airports makes the task of designing  and building such access control systems challenging.

In this project, we focus on the specification and verification of distributed authorization models for securing access to buildings and other physical infrastructures.

In particular, we address the following research topics:

• Requirements analysis for next-generation access control systems.
• Specification and verification of fail-safe distributed access control models.
  
• Design of expressive, formal authorization models that are analysable and address the specified requirements.
  

Publications

None so far.