Privacy Aware Key Establishment for Publish/Subscribe Infrastructures in Ubiquitous Environments

i .HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Faculty of Information and Natural Sciences Degree Programme of Security and Mobile Computing ABSTRACT OF MASTER’S THESIS Author Date 30/06/2008 Pages Ergawy , Amr Ibrahim Ahmed 128 Title of thesis Privacy Aware Key Establishment for Publish/Subscribe Infrastructures in Ubiquitous Environments Professorship Professorship Code Data Communications Software T-110 Supervisors Ma Prof. Sasu Tarkoma, Helsinki University of Technology Associate Prof. Peter Sjödin, The Royal Institute of Technology Instructor Ma Prof. Sasu Tarkoma, Helsinki University of Technology Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp, is a vision of embedding computing to every aspect of our day to day life. In ubiquitous computing, interaction among communicating entities exists in highly dynamic, large scale and failure prone environments. Publish/Subscribe interaction paradigm, Pub/Sub, can be used to decouple interacting entities in ubiquitous environments by delivering events based on users interests. In this scenario, securing events dissemination and protecting users’ privacy are essential requirements for ubiquitous applications. In this thesis, we propose an encryption key establishment scheme for encrypting disseminated events in ubiquitous Pub/Sub infrastructures. The proposed key establishment scheme considers the dynamism, scalability and failure tolerance issues of ubiquitous environments. More importantly, the generated encryption keys reflect multi level access control polices, which is important to enforce users’ privacy polices.