Designing a Publish-Substrate for Privacy/Security in Pervasive Environments

Abstract

The emergence of a multitude of technologies for tracking locations is leading to the design of pervasive location-tracking environments. In order to explore issues in the design of such environments, the University of Michigan is deploying a network of location sensors in a number of buildings. Managing privacy is expected to be a significant concern for acceptance of such pervasive environments. This paper outlines an initial design of a publish-subscribe communication substrate for controlled distribution of sensor data. We describe our prototype as well as a privacy-aware location-tracking application built on top of the system. The focus of this paper is on policy management so as to provide means for allowing users to control distribution of data tagged with their ID to other users and services. The paper shows how a wide variety of policies can be specified in the system and points out directions for future work.