Context and Location-Aware Encryption for Pervasive Computing Environments

Pervasive computing promises to revolutionize computing, empower mobile users, and enhance mo-bility, customizability and adaptability of computing environments. Intrinsic to the notion of such environ-ments is the capturing of location and context informa-tion. Context awareness and validation enables sig-nificant functionality to pervasive computing applica-tions, users, resources and the ways they interact. Much of this functionality depends on validating con-text information and using it for granting access to data or resources. In this paper we propose an encryp-tion and access control framework that uses both con-text and identity to determine whether an entity or a group of entities may access protected services, data, devices, and other resources. We assume that the re-sources are context-sensitive, thus requiring the re-questing entity to be under a specific context before it is able to access the resource or decrypt the informa-tion. Our approach is unique in the way that we de-couple context from identity, which adds extra secu-rity, facilitates value-added services, and enables effi-cient key management for group communication. 1