Pervasive geo-security - a lightweight triple-A approach to securing distributed geo-service infrastructures

Security has recently become a major concern in distributed geo-infrastructures for spatial data provision. Thus, a lightweight approach for securing distributed low-power environments such as geo-sensor networks is needed. The first part of this article presents a survey of current security mechanisms for authentication and authorisation. Based on this survey, a lightweight and scalable token-based security infrastructure was developed, which is tailored for use in distributed geo-web service infrastructures. The developed security framework comprises dedicated components for authentication, rule-based authorisation and optimised storage and administration of access rules. For validation purposes, a prototypical implementation of the approach has been created.