Vigil: Providing Trust for Enhanced Security in Pervasive Systems

Authors: Lalana Kagal, Jeffrey L Undercoffer, Filip Perich, Anupam Joshi, and Yelena Yesha

Date: August 12, 2002

Abstract: Computing today is moving away from the desktop, becoming diffused into our surroundings and onto our personal digital devices. Moreover, ad-hoc networks such as Bluetooth provide for spontaneous connectivity between computationally enabled devices within proximity to each other. In such pervasive computing environments, users expect to access resources and services at any time from anywhere. This expectation results in serious security issues, since devices are constantly interacting with others outside of their �home� environments. We describe the security challenges in pervasive computing, explaining why traditional security mechanisms fail to meet the demands of these environments. We use an agent-oriented paradigm to model the interactions between computationally enabled entities in such dynamic environments, and present an infrastructure that combines existing authentication features like Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI) with notions of policy driven interaction and distributed trust, in order to provide a highly flexible approach for enforcing security policies in pervasive computing environments. We present an implementation of the system on a variety of handheld/laptop devices using Bluetooth/802.11, and include an ontology to describe principals, credentials and policies.

Type: TechReport

Institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Tags: pervasive computing, policy, security, agent

Google Scholar: search

Number of downloads: 2472

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size: 235598 bytes

Related Projects:

Past Projects

 Intrusion Detection.
 Rei : A Policy Specification Language.
 Securing the Semantic Web: A Trust Management Approach.
 Vigil / Secure Centaurus.

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