Usage control is a promising approach for access control in open, distributed, heterogeneous and network-connected computer environments. It encompasses and enhances traditional access control models, Trust Management (TM) and Digital Rights Management (DRM), and its main novelties are mutability of attributes and continuity of access decision evaluation.

The FIWARE Cosmos Orion Flink Connector is the main piece for the Data User side of the Usage Control Architecture in FIWARE. Since it provides a direct connection with Orion, there needs to be a way of ensuring that only allowed operations are performed on data. This is achieved by the traces generated by the Flink processing engine, which are sent to the PDP/PXP component of the Usage Control Architecture. Release 7.7 already supports this feature. To find more about data usage control and how to configure your Flink cluster in order to achieve it, check out this repository.