Swee Keow Goo

Location privacy and the personal distributed environment

The personal distributed environment is a new concept being developed within the mobile VCE core 3 research programme whereby users have access to their services and data through a distributed set of terminals, wherever their location: ubiquitous access. Devices are co-ordinated by device management entities (DMEs), which are either Local DMEs, controlling devices within a single PDE subnetwork at a users home or office. For example, or an overall root DME providing universal co-ordination and a single point of contact. While such a structure allows very flexible service delivery, it has serious security concerns, as the presence of signalling between root and local DMEs will allow the location of the user to be determined at all times. In this paper, we analyse the security threats to the DME structure proposed for the PDE, and introduce a system of tunnelling and mix networks to provide security and privacy.

Trust architecture for a personal distributed environment

With an increasing number of wireless devices and access technologies available, users will be able to access their personal distributed environment of services and data conveniently in a wide variety of ways. Unfortunately this flexibility comes at a cost - higher security risks and vulnerabilities. The traditional association with a network provider may not exist, replaced by a far more nebulous association with a number of unknown entities, network nodes and service providers. These ad hoc relationships require a notion of trust, which presents great difficulties in a dynamic wireless environment. This paper presents a formal trust architecture to address these issues, with the focus on aspects of trust policy formation and its evolution.

Preserving Privacy in Assistive Technologies

Assistive technologies enable individuals to perform a function that might be difficult or they otherwise are unable to do. However, the provision of context-awareness interfaces and accessible information everywhere bring with them the potential for data violations, with concomitant privacy issues such as spying and exploitation. Privacy preservation can thus constrain deployment. The aim of this paper is to promote user sensitiveness in privacy policy and tackle malicious data extraction and selling, with the focus on assistive technologies for a diverse mix of services for use in applications ranging from healthcare to smart shopping.

Designing & verifying secure protocols of the digital marketplace

The mobile VCEs digital marketplace (DMP) is a system, which allows very short term trading of radio resources. It uses autonomous agents to request and negotiate the provision of communications services in a dynamic and competitive manner. While showing great promise, many security concerns involving the adoption of the DMP infrastructure by the future mobile communications industry remain unresolved. This paper examines the cryptographic protocol that plays an essential influencing role in creating a secure service negotiation platform.