Personal PKI for the smart device era

Abstract

As people use an increasing number of smart devices for their everyday computing, it is surprising that these powerful, internet-enabled devices are rarely connected together to create personal networks. The webinos project is an attempt to make this possible so that resources can easily be shared between devices, regardless of the operating system or network they are using. However, increased connectivity raises a number of security and privacy issues, and in this paper we introduce a public key infrastructure designed to be suitable for personal computing across multiple devices. We recognize the need for our PKI to work on both mobile and home networks, use existing online user identities and take into consideration the different interaction styles found on smart devices in different form factors. We propose a set of principles for personal key infrastructures, describe our implementation and outline how it mitigates common threats and issues. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.