LOCK: A Highly Accurate, Easy-to-Use Location-Based Access Control System

With proliferation of ubiquitous computing, digital access is facing an increasing risk since unauthorized client located at any place may intrude a local server. Location Based Access Control (LBAC) is a promising solution that tries to protect the client’s access within some user-defined secure zones. Although a lot of prior work has focused on LBAC, most of them suffer from coarse judgment resolution problem or considerable manual setting-up efforts. This paper proposes LOCK, a highly accurate, easy-to-use LBAC system, which uses autonomous ultrasound positioning devices and an access control engine to precisely characterize the secure zones and accurately judge the online access authority. Particularly, the ultrasound positioning device provides relative 3D coordinate of the mobile clients. Measurement-Free Calibration (MFC) is proposed to easily calibrate these positioning devices to transform their relative positioning results into an absolute coordinate system. In this coordinate system, secure zones are characterized by a Coherent Secure Zone Fitting (CSZF) method to compensate the disparity between manually measured secure zone and the secure zone seen by the positioning devices. Furthermore, a Round-Trip Judgment (RTJ) algorithm is designed to fast online determine the geographical relationship between the client’s position and such secure zones. A prototype of LOCK system was implemented by defining a meeting table as secure zone to control the client’s access to a FTP server. Experiment results show that the system can be easily set up and can control the client’s access with centimeter level judgment resolution.