Feasibility study of context-awareness device Comfort calculation methods and their application to comfort-based access control

Mobile devices have become more powerful and are increasingly integrated in the everyday life of people; from playing games, taking pictures and interacting with social media to replacing credit cards in payment solutions. Some actions may only be appropriate in some situations, so the security of a mobile device is therefore increasingly linked to its context, such as its location, surroundings (e.g. objects in the immediate environment) and so on.

However, situational awareness and context are not captured by traditional security models. In this paper, we examine the notion of Device Comfort, which captures a device's ability to secure and reason about its environment. Specifically, we study the feasibility of two device comfort calculation methods we proposed in previous work.

We do trace driven simulations based on a large body of sensed data from mobile devices in the real world. This allows us to analyze the influence of the context on the comfort level of the device in different perceived contexts in the real world. Moreover, to demonstrate the utility of our device comfort calculation methods, we apply it to comfort-based access control for mobile devices.

We present the policy enforcement framework and show how to enforce our two methods using an existing security policy specification language.