Security and privacy rights management for mobile and ubiquitous computing

A new computing era after mainframes, PC’s and mobiles is becoming more and more anticipated since the beginning of the 21st century: Ubiquitous Computing. A common characteristic behind this approach is that, it is based on a substantially more flexible system understanding, whereby the thought of the system as a tool moves into the background and the needs and wishes of the user step into the foreground. In this paper we describe a generic mechanism for security and privacy rights management in mobile and ubiquitous computing environments that is based on the idea of seeing context information as intellectual property and enforcing privacyand ownership of users. This is achieved by a security and context management architecture that enables each described object in a context to directly or indirectly control the process of creating a package of sensible or personal information and licensing it (via existing DRM concepts) to any service provider that is interested in consuming this information.