An Impregnable Lightweight Device Discovery (ILDD) Model for the Pervasive Computing Environment of Enterprise Applications

Abstract

The worldwide use of handheld devices (personal digital assistants, cell phones, etc.) with wireless connectivity will reach 2.6 billion units this year and 4 billion by 2010. More specifically, these handheld devices have become an integral part of industrial applications. These devices form pervasive ad hoc wireless networks that aide in industry applications. However, pervasive computing is susceptible and vulnerable to malicious active and passive snoopers. This is due to the unavoidable interdevice dependency, as well as a common shared medium, very transitory connectivity, and the absence of a fixed trust infrastructure. In order to ensure security and privacy in the pervasive environment, we need a mechanism to maintain a list of valid devices that will help to prevent malicious devices from participating in any task. In this paper, we will show the feasibility of using a modified human- computer authentication protocol in order to prevent the malicious attacks of ad hoc networks in industrial applications. We will also present two separate models for both large and small networks, as well as several possible attack scenarios for each network.