Development of Secure Event Service for Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

In ubiquitous computing, application should adapt itself to the environment in accordance with context information. Context manager is able to transfer context information to application by using event service. Existing event services are mainly implemented by using RPC or CORBA. However, since conventional distributed systems concentrate on transparency hiding network intricacies from programmers — treating them as hidden implementation details that the programmer must implicitly be aware of and deal with, it is not easy to develop reliable distributed services. Jini provides some novel solutions to many of the problems that classical systems have focused on, and makes some of the problems that those systems have addressed simply vanish. But there is no event servicein Jini. In this paper, we design and implement a secure event service, SeJES, based on Jini in order to provide reliable ubiquitous environment. By using the proposed event service, event consumers are able to retrieve events based on the content. In addition, it enables only authorized suppliers and consumers to exchange event each other. We use SPKI/SDSI certificates in order to provide authentication and authorization and extend JavaSpaces package in order to provide a content-based event retrieval service.