Mobile Intelligence

19.7 SUMMARY

This chapter has discussed requirements for the design of location-based access control systems and their main differences with respect to traditional access control solutions. We have shown how an access control language can be extended to support the definition and evaluation of location-based conditions. Privacy requirements for protecting location information have also been described. In particular, the trade-off between the need of information accuracy required by LBAC systems and the obfuscation of the same information for privacy reasons has been considered. Some basic obfuscation techniques have been defined together with a general metric, called relevance, that can be used for both measuring the degree of location privacy and the degree of accuracy required. Examples and case studies enriched the presentation of issues and concepts. Many research issues need to be further investigated, such as the analysis of secondary effects of location predicate evaluation, de-obfuscation attacks, and strategies for the negotiation of QoS attributes.