Secure personal network

Abstract

Recently, Personal Networks (PNs) have been focused in supporting the userpsilas business and private activities without jeopardizing privacy and security of the users and their data. The support in business and private activities will take place through the userpsilas own personal network consisting of a core Personal Area Network (PAN) extended with clusters of remote devices which could be private, shared, or public and able to adapt to the quality of the network accessed. The extended PAN with its cluster communication with another PN forms a Federation of Personal Networks (PN-F). PN-F is a secure cooperation between different PNs, making services and resources available for the purpose of achieving a common goal, increasing the security requirements and challenges. The communication in this scenario can happen in various places (home, work, public places), involving various types of network infrastructure, between various types of hardware, and exchanging any kind of service. Context aware security manager (CASM) has been proposed to solve the PN security issue, putting all the security decision in the gateway between PAN and cluster or PN and another PN. CASM relies on providing security policy based on the context being given by user. So far, algorithm regarding how to input the context has not yet been defined. Furthermore, how CASM react upon the context in deciding what security action should be performed has also not yet been elaborated. This paper will analyze the impact of context to security. The paper will work as a continuation of CASM by elaborating further a proposed algorithm on defining the context parameters, quantifying context parameter so that CASM can make decision upon it, and optimizing the matrix of context information.