Access control in a privacy-aware eLearning environment

Abstract

Access control is necessary to prevent illegal accesses to shared resources. Within eLearning, access control is required in order to protect provided contents and services as well as user data. Usually, access rights are assigned to users of a system. However, in a system that applies privacy-enhancing identity management (PIM) common approaches cannot be directly utilized since users do not act under fix login names. Within this paper, we want to discuss how protection of contents as well as of user data can be realized in such an environment. The context of our work is the eLearning application BluES'n which additionally aims at providing users a flexible working environment. All functionality needed for realizing access control is provided by a PIM-aware platform which is currently developed within the European project PRIME.