An authorisation and privacy framework for context-aware networks

Making network-centric context information available to hosts, network nodes and users allows them to make more meaningful decisions to accomplishing a self-organising behaviour. Instead of implicitly offering services as today we suggest a shift towards explicitly expressing context information that can be used with user context information to allow applications to operate more efficiently. Since security is of great concern when context information is accumulated and made available we combine it with a privacy-sensitive authorisation framework. This security framework is flexible and powerful enough to operate on both user- and network-context information. The paper demonstrates how a context-aware network architecture can be mapped to the IETF GEOPRIV privacy and authorisation framework to restrict and control the distribution of context information.