Lightweight access control system for wearable devices

Abstract

Wearable devices are being used in areas such as the health and military environments where, due to information sensitivity, access control is essential. In these environments, it is necessary to be able to control the way information is handled by the wearable device. However, current security solutions for wearable devices focus mostly on protecting information access from unauthorized parties (using encryption) and do not cover the access control over the information when this is handled by the wearable itself. With this in mind, the authors propose a wearable device access control system that, in addition to protecting the information from unauthorized access, also allows defining (using a security policy) and enforcing (using a hardware and software solution) a set of restrictions about how the information should be handled. They also present a security evaluation of the proposed access control system and a prototype that validates the solution.