A Security-by-Contracts Architecture for Pervasive Services

Future pervasive environments will be characterised by pervasive client downloads: new (untrusted) clients will be dynamically downloaded in order to exploit the computational power of the nomadic devices to make a better use of the services available in the environment. To address the challenges of this paradigm we propose the notion of security-by-contract (SxC), as in programming-by-contract, based on the notion of a mobile contract that a pervasive download carries with itself. It describes the relevant security features of the application and the relevant security interactions with its nomadic host. In this paper we describe the layered security architecture of the SxC paradigm for pervasive security, the threats and mitigation strategies of security services and sketch some interaction modalities of the security services layer. © 2007 IEEE.