Security Issues in Ubiquitous Computing

The manifesto of ubiquitous computing is traditionally considered to be the justly famous 1991 visionary article written for Scientific American by the late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC (Weiser, 1991). But the true birth date of this revolution, perhaps hard to pinpoint precisely, precedes that publication by at least a few years: Weiser himself first spoke of “ubiquitous computing” around 1988 and other researchers around the world had also been focusing their efforts in that direction during the late Eighties. Indeed, one of the images in Weiser’s article depicts an Active Badge, an infrared-emitting tag worn by research scientists to locate their colleagues when they were not in their office (in the days before mobile phones were commonplace) and to enable audio and video phone call rerouting and other follow-me applications. That device was initially developed by Roy Want and Andy Hopper (Want, Hopper, Falcao, and Gibbons, 1992) at Olivetti Research Limited (ORL) in 1989. Soon afterwards other research institutions, including Xerox PARC themselves who later hired Want, acquired Active Badge installations and started to explore the wide horizons opened by the novel idea of letting your spatial position be an input that implicitly told the computer system what to do. I was fortunate enough to work at ORL as a research scientist throughout the Nineties, thereby acquiring first hand experience of these and other pioneering developments in ubiquitous computing2. Looking back and putting things into historical perspective, ubiquitous computing really was a revolution, one of these major events in computing that take place once