Privacy and Identity Management in a Layered Pervasive Service Platform

Abstract

Making pervasive computing reality is a challenging task mainly due to the multitude of functional requirements and technological constraints. In parallel to the honourable research progress in specific technologies, the Daidalos project assessed that in future there will be the need for a pervasive service platform with open interfaces in order to simplify service development and provisioning. The success of such a platform depends on the balance of different aspects, e.g. operational costs with revenue potentials, collection of personal data for context-awareness with privacy protection, manual control and transparency with enhanced user experience and simplicity. In this paper we show the Daidalos approach to privacy protection and identity management for a future pervasive service platform and its architecture. We show how user identities are structured to support dynamic context information while following regulations for privacy protection in Europe. Special focus is put on the trade-off between access control for privacy protection and user experience. This is achieved by automated identity selection, automatic derivation of fine-grained access control policies and their deployment. We also present gathered performance data and implementation details of our ID Broker concept.