Trust and Authorization in Pervasive B2E Scenarios

Many pervasive and ubiquitous application scenarios consider the interaction of users with surrounding devices offering services anywhere and anytime as one of the main future challenges. However, before this vision becomes reality, many security issues have to be solved. More specifically, the problem of trustworthiness of unknown devices is one of the major obstacles hindering the acceptance of pervasive applications. This paper focuses on solutions for business-to-employee scenarios, a particular sub-domain of the ubiquitous computing paradigm in which valuable a priori trust information is available. Mechanisms and protocols are introduced to assess the trustworthiness of devices federated around a mobile user, and to allow for the delegation of authorizations between such devices. The first results of a prototype implementation are finally presented.