Department of Computer Science and Technology

Technical reports

Protocols and technologies for security in pervasive computing and communications

Ford Long Wong

January 2008, 167 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted August 2007 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Girton College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-709

Abstract

As the state-of-the-art edges towards Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), we found that we have to revise some previous assumptions about security engineering for this domain. Ubicomp devices have to be networked together to be able to realize their promise. To communicate securely amongst themselves, they have to establish secret session keys, but this is a difficult problem when this is done primarily over radio in an ad-hoc scenario, i.e. without the aid of an infrastructure (such as a PKI), and when it is assumed that the devices are resource-constrained and cannot perform complex calculations. Secondly, when ubicomp devices are carried by users as personal items, their permanent identifiers inadvertently allow the users to be tracked, to the detriment of user privacy. Unless there are deliberate improvements in designing for location privacy, ubicomp devices can be trivially detected, and linked to individual users, with discomfiting echoes of a surveillance society. Our findings and contributions are thus as follow. In considering session key establishment, we learnt that asymmetric cryptography is not axiomatically infeasible, and may in fact be essential, to counter possible attackers, for some of the more computationally capable (and important) devices. We next found existing attacker models to be inadequate, along with existing models of bootstrapping security associations, in ubicomp. We address the inadequacies with a contribution which we call: ‘multi-channel security protocols’, by leveraging on multiple channels, with different properties, existing in the said environment. We gained an appreciation of the fact that location privacy is really a multi-layer problem, particularly so in ubicomp, where an attacker often may have access to different layers. Our contributions in this area are to advance the design for location privacy by introducing a MAC-layer proposal with stronger unlinkability, and a physical-layer proposal with stronger unobservability.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-709,
  author =	 {Wong, Ford Long},
  title = 	 {{Protocols and technologies for security in pervasive
         	   computing and communications}},
  year = 	 2008,
  month = 	 jan,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-709.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-709},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-709}
}