Security, trust and privacy supported by context-aware middleware

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in building automation, healthcare and agriculture. In the EU project Hydra1 highlevel security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios especially in the user domains of building automation, healthcare, and agriculture. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project, its user domains and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the building automation domain typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta Model. How concepts such as context security, semantic security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of a technical building automation scenario.

Towards semantic resolution of security in ambient environments

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in different domains. In the EU project Hydra high-level security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the. Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the user domain "building automation" typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta-Model. How concepts such as context, semantic resolution of security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of it technical building automation scenario.

Next generation mobile marketing: how young consumers react to Bluetooth-enabled advertising

Mobile devices are attractive media for directly communicating with consumers who have become busier and more difficult to reach. While SMS (short message service) advertising has received some attention in the literature, Bluetooth-enabled advertising is still unexplored. This research aims to investigate younger consumers’ acceptance of Bluetooth-delivered advertising. Although the majority of the respondents were willing to accept this form of advertising, they needed both to be in control of the frequency with which they receive messages and also to be reassured that the medium could ensure privacy and security. The research further indicated that peers influence the acceptance of Bluetooth-driven advertising.

Obstacle avoidance routing scheme through optimal sink movement for home monitoring and mobile robotic consumer devices

In recent years, ZigBee has been proven to be an excellent solution to create scalable and flexible home automation networks. In a home automation network, consumer devices typically collect data from a home monitoring environment and then transmit the data to an end user through multi-hop communication without the need for any human intervention. However, due to the presence of typical obstacles in a home environment, error-free reception may not be possible, particularly for power constrained devices. A mobile sink based data transmission scheme can be one solution but obstacles create significant complexities for the sink movement path determination process. Therefore, an obstacle avoidance data routing scheme is of vital importance to the design of an efficient home automation system. This paper presents a mobile sink based obstacle avoidance routing scheme for a home monitoring system. The mobile sink collects data by traversing through the obstacle avoidance path. Through ZigBee based hardware implementation and verification, the proposed scheme successfully transmits data through the obstacle avoidance path to improve network performance in terms of life span, energy consumption and reliability. The application of this work can be applied to a wide range of intelligent pervasive consumer products and services including robotic vacuum cleaners and personal security robots1.