Privacy aware key establishment for publish/subscribe infrastructures in Ubiquitous environments

Abstract

Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp, is a vision of embedding computing to every aspect of our day to day life. In ubiquitous computing, interaction among communicating entities exists in highly dynamic, large scale and failure prone environments. Publish/Subscribe interaction paradigm, Pub/Sub, can be used to decouple interacting entities in ubiquitous environments by delivering events based on users interests. In this scenario, securing events dissemination and protecting users' privacy are essential requirements for ubiquitous applications. In this thesis, we propose an encryption key establishment scheme for encrypting disseminated events in ubiquitous Pub/Sub infrastructures. The proposed key establishment scheme considers the dynamism, scalability and failure tolerance issues of ubiquitous environments. More importantly, the generated encryption keys reflect multi level access control polices, which is important to enforce users' privacy polices.