NA - Efficient Security and Privacy solutions for Applications in Wireless Networks - E-SPAWN

The area of security and privacy for wireless and mobile applications is undoubtedly complex, and there are many potential directions for future research. Wireless devices and networks are resource constrained (battery, bandwidth and CPU) making it a sign ificant challenge to achieve security and privacy of data. There is thus a need to develop and validate a coherent framework for efficient security and privacy for applications and services in wireless networks. The objective of this pre-project is to pre pare proposals with preliminary work for a research project to study challenges in security and privacy arising in the context of data management, data integration and data distribution in wireless and mobile network environments. We need a holistic appro ach to security and privacy on wireless mobile systems, since the security of a system is only as strong as the weakest element. Unlike wired networks that have some degree of physical security, physical security in wireless networks is impossible to achi eve on wireless links. Security attacks on information flow (denial of service, spoofing, and so on) can be widespread in wireless networks. Information security methods and security protocols must counter these attacks efficiently because of the resource constraints in wireless devices and networks. Our approach consists in developing mechanisms that ensure a high degree of privacy, relieve users from dealing with wireless service providers' privacy policies, and reduce the service providers? requirement s for safeguarding private information. Such mechanisms will be based on semantic meta-data descriptions of security and privacy requirements enabling automatic negotiations between users and service providers to achieve the best efficiency for the desire d degree of security and privacy. In this pre-project we plan to investigate the challenges in designing mechanisms for wireless environments that can provide the proposed kind of service.