Security Issues in Ubiquitous Computing*

Abstract

The manifesto of ubiquitous computing is traditionally considered to be the justly famous 1991 visionary article written for Scientific American by the late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC [64]. But the true birth date of this revolution, perhaps hard to pinpoint precisely, precedes that publication by at least a few years: Weiser himself first spoke of “ubiquitous computing” around 1988 and other researchers around the world had also been focusing their efforts in that direction during the late Eighties. Indeed, one of the images in Weiser’s article depicts an Active Badge, an infrared-emitting tag worn by research scientists to locate their colleagues when they were not in their office (in the days before mobile phones were commonplace) and to enable audio and video phone call rerouting and other follow-me applications.