An access control system to improve security amongst randomly associated nodes in BYOD network

The growth of mobile devices both in variety and in computational abilities have given birth to a concept in the corporate world known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Employees are allowed under this concept to bring personally owned mobile devices for official work. Though relatively new, it has gained up to 53% patronage among organisations, and it is expected to hit 88% in the near future. Its popularity is driven by the significant advantages it brings along such as reduced cost, employee satisfaction and improved productivity, to mention a few. However, as a relatively new concept, it also introduces new security challenges; for instance, the organisation looses the ownership of devices used for official work, to the employees. Implying that the employees own and manage the devices they use to work, including seeing to the security needs of such devices. With this development, protecting the corporate network becomes more challenging; outsmarting the usual traditional access control mechanisms, owing to the highly dynamic nature of mobile devices. Considering the fact that BYOD is also a type of pervasive/dynamic environment, this work studies similar dynamic environments, relating to how their security challenges are addressed, as bases to propose an algorithm for enhancing the security of BYOD via access control. Various access control mechanisms have also been adequately analyzed as a justification for the proposed approach