An Agent Approach to Security in Pervasive Environments

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 18

SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium

Security has always been important in computer systems and has now become even more crucial with open, dynamic environments like the Internet, Semantic Web and wirelessly connected pervasive systems. In such environments, users and resources can be extremely unstable, changing their location, contact information, policies, and even functionality often. Existing security mechanisms fail to meet the requirements of pervasive systems, which include authenticating foreign users, and providing authorization to a large number of dynamic entities in the absence of a central control or a repository. Our research proposes to model pervasive systems using agent technologies and to use principles of distributed trust as an alternative to traditional authentication and access control schemes.