A Trust-Based Security Architecture for Ubiquitous Computing Systems

Abstract

Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is a revolution of computing paradigm that promises to have a profound affect on the way we interact with computers, devices, physical spaces and other people. Traditional authentication and access control which has been applied to stand-alone computers and small networks are not adequate to ubicomp technology. Instead, we need a new security model that is based on notion of trust to support cross-domain interactions and collaborations. This means that ubicomp environments involves the interaction, coordination, and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. Authenticating the identity certificate of a previous unknown user does not provide any access control information. Simple authentication and access control are only effective if the system knows in advance which users are going to access the system and what their access rights are. Security information in different domains is subject to inconsistent interpretations in such open, distributed environment. In order to fulfill these security requirements of ubicomp, in this paper we present USEC, A Trust-based Security Infrastructure, for securing ubicomp systems. USEC is being developed for CAMUS. It is composed of seven major components: hybrid access control, entity recognition, trust/risk management, intrusion detection, privacy control, andhome firewall. Our objective is to provide a lightweight infrastructure with sufficient security services that tackles most security problems in ubicomp systems.

This work is financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development(MODE), the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy(MOCIE), and the Ministry of Labor(MOLAB) through the fostering project of the Lab of Excellency.