Research On Security Technology Of Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing environments with their interconnected devices and services promise seamless integration of digital infrastructure into our everyday lives and work. While the focus of current research is on how to connect new devices and build useful applications to improve functionality, the security and privacy issues in such environments have not been explored in any depth. Existing security policies and mechanisms may not provide adequate guarantees to deal with new exposures and vulnerabilities introduced by the pervasive computing paradigm. In this paper, we explore the technological challenges for building security and privacy into the pervasive computing environments, concentrate mainly on anatomizing the limitations of the traditional entity authentication mechanisms, put forward and describe the principle and prototype implementation of the entity authentication appropriate for the pervasive computing. The main contributions of this paper are as follows.(1) To anatomize deeply and thoroughly the limitations and deficiencies of the traditional entity authentications. The conventional entity authentications need some basic assumptions and features, but these assumptions and features are no longer suitable for the pervasive computing. And they depend on the trust of the entities and the support of the trusted third party to carry out the identity identification. Furthermore, entity authentication requires a binding between a principal, and more precisely the identity of a principal and some information and there must be assurance that this binding is correct. Finally, an obvious feature of entity authentication is the essentially static and binary nature of the assurance it delivers.(2) To put forward multi-attribute and context-aware entity authentications based on the aforementioned analysis. Multi-attribute authentication breaks through the limitation of the traditional entity authentication in which only the identity is authenticated, and allows various attributes of the entity such as identity, roles, location, current social relationships to partake in the process of the authentication, different attributes with diverse confidence values. More attributes can be authenticated together; so much higher confidence value is achieved. Context-aware entity authentication makes extensive use of the context information sensed by the pervasive computing environments, like user context, time context or computing context to identify the entity.(3) To summarize the type of the context in the pervasive computing environments and propose the concept of the"security context". Security context has the general and special notions, and its special notion means a set of information collected from the pervasive computing environments and that is relevant to the security infrastructure of pervasive computing, determining and affecting the security level, authentication mechanisms, access...