Literature: social networks & privacy in ubiquitous systems

I searched for more information about both topics, and found different papers. A summary of five papers that I found (partly) interesting can be found here.

summaries of literature, part 3

Because I needed to find a way to respect the user’s privacy in my scenario, I continued my literature study.

First I started looking explicitely for more information about “Gaia”, a middleware that allowed authentication for portable devices, based on Kerberos. I ended up having to let this idea go, since this project apparently doesn’t seem to be supported anymore (the latest information I found about it on it’s website and in papers, dates from 2002).

So I started searching for other possible solutions. While doing this, I read several papers on authentication in ubiquitous systems (summaries of the interesting papers can be found here).

After reading these papers, and realising that authentication mechanisms designed specifically for portable devices are not widespread, my conclusion for now is that I will probably use a combination of existing methods to determine which information the user’s device will communicate to another device:

• indicators of quality of service:
  • precision (the granularity of the information that is given out);
  • freshness (is the information still valid);
  • spatial resolution (can the device I interact with really be it says it is? For example, a device in a coffee shop that tells me it is a hospital computer, will probably be wrong/malicious).
• certificates: windows mobile has SSL certificates support.

Summaries of papers for literature study

A summary of papers I read about Security and Authentication in distributed systems (particularly context-aware and ubiquitous systems) can be found here.

Summary of papers

I made a short summary of papers I read for the literature study of my thesis. They can be found in the file summariesPapers.pdf.