A privacy-aware service protocol for ubiquitous computing environments

Abstract

In a ubiquitous computing environment, every service should have the characteristic of context-awareness and location information is an important factor to grasp a user's context. Thus, location privacy is an major security issue of ubiquitous computing environment. Most research on location privacy is focused on protecting the location information itself. However, not only prohibiting acquirement of the sensitive information illegally but also forbidding abuse of the information obtained legally is important to protect user privacy. In order to satisfy this claim, we propose a new privacy-aware service protocol for a ubiquitous computing environment. The proposed protocol decouples the relation between a user's identity and location. Moreover, it uses anonymous communication channel to hide the user's service consume pattern. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.