A Framework for the Analysis of Access Control Models for Interactive Mobile Devices

The Java Micro Edition platform (JME), a Java enabled technology, provides the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) standard that facilitates applications development and specifies a security model for the controlled access to sensitive resources of the device. The model builds upon the notion of protection domain, which in turn can be grasped as a set of permissions. An alternative model has been proposed that extends MIDP’s by introducing permissions with multiplicities and adding flexibility to the way in which permissions are granted by the user of the device and used by the applications running on it. This paper presents a framework, formalized using the proof-assistant Coq, suitable for defining and comparing the access control policies that can be enforced by (variants of) those security models and to prove desirable properties they should satisfy. The proofs of some of those properties are also stated and discussed in this work.