Location privacy and the personal distributed environment

Abstract

The personal distributed environment is a new concept being developed within the mobile VCE core 3 research programme whereby users have access to their services and data through a distributed set of terminals, wherever their location: ubiquitous access. Devices are co-ordinated by device management entities (DMEs), which are either Local DMEs, controlling devices within a single PDE subnetwork at a user's home or office. For example, or an overall root DME providing universal co-ordination and a single point of contact. While such a structure allows very flexible service delivery, it has serious security concerns, as the presence of signalling between root and local DMEs will allow the location of the user to be determined at all times. In this paper, we analyse the security threats to the DME structure proposed for the PDE, and introduce a system of tunnelling and mix networks to provide security and privacy.