Security, Privacy and Trust Issues in Smart Environments

Abstract

Recent advances in networking, handheld computing and sensor technologies have driven forward research towards the realisation of Mark Weiser's dream of calm and ubiquitous computing. In turn, this has led to the emergence of smart environments as one significant facet of research in this domain. Smart environments, by definition, are designed to exploit rich combinations of small distributed sensing/computational nodes to identify and deliver personalized services to the user when they are interacting and exchanging information with the environment. Within such environments there is a high demand on solutions to users to be secure, private and trustworthy. Security describes the cryptographic techniques used to secure the communications channels and required data. Privacy in this context encompasses reasoning about trust and risk involved in interactions between users. Trust, therefore, controls the amount of information that can be revealed, and risk analysis allows us to evaluate the expected benefit that would motivate users to participate in these interactions. In this chapter we endeavor to survey selected work in these three disparate, but related, areas and to situate them in the unique problems of smart environments.