A Lightweight, Privacy Preserving and Secure Service Discovery Protocol in Ubiquitous Computing Environment

During service discovery, preserving privacy of end users and service providers is one of the challenging research issues in ubiquitous computing environment (UCE). To solve this issue, we define service group and classify it into two cases: public service and private service. End users’ privacy is important in public service group while privacy of end users and service providers are important in private service group. Based on this observation, we propose a lightweight, privacy preserving and secure service discovery protocol for UCE. Our protocol needs less computation overhead from the view of user while providing mutual authentication and entity anonymity. In addition, it provides accountability, improves non-linkability, enhances security level by sharing a selected number set, and does not rely on underlying system infrastructure. Differentiated service access control is also feasible by arranging users in different service groups. Since our proposed protocol is designed for providing security services in middleware, the protocol can be used to build a security framework adapting its security service to end users’ circumstances while preserving a certain security level.