The Claim Tool Kit for ad hoc recognition of peer entities

In ubiquitous/pervasive computing environments, it is envisaged that computing elements— entities—will start interacting in an ad hoc fashion. The peer-to-peer (p2p) paradigm is appealing for such types of interaction especially with JXTA, which supports the development of reusable p2p building blocks, which facilitate implementation on any smart device. However, the inability to rely on a centralised authentication infrastructure, the openness of the environment and the absence of an administrator (it is assumed to be too expensive to have a skilled administrator at hand due to the large number of peers) challenge the use of legacy authentication mechanisms. Supporting spontaneous interactions among previously unknown entities requires dynamic enrolment of strangers and unknown entities. Entity recognition (ER) is a process that is carried out each time an interaction happens between entities in order to dynamically recognise previously met entities. In this paper, we present the Claim Tool Kit (CTK), a Java-based implementation of ER: entities exchange messages, called Claims, and rely on their associated clues to evaluate the level of confidence in recognition. The CTK employs advanced features available with Java, such as JXTA and Java Cryptography and Security Architectures. We show that the CTK needs performance results on these features in order to increase the level of auto-configuration of the CTK. We describe how to obtain performance assessment for some of these new features. Finally, we explain how the CTK can be instrumented to take into account performance assessment. By analysing the evaluation results, the applicability of these advanced Java-based technologies for peer entity recognition is assessed. ∗ Corresponding address: 2850 route nationale, 74120 Megève, France. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.-M. Seigneur), [email protected] (C.D. Jensen). URL: http://www.trustcomp.org (J.-M. Seigneur). 0167-6423/$ see front matter © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2004.05.005 50 J.-M. Seigneur, C.D. Jensen / Science of Computer Programming 54 (2005) 49–71 © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.