Access-controlled resource discovery in pervasive networks

Networks of the future will be characterized by a variety of computational devices that display a level of dynamism not seen in traditional wired networks. Because of the dynamic nature of these networks, resource discovery is one of the fundamental problems that must be solved. While resource discovery systems are not a novel concept, securing these systems in an efficient and scalable way is challenging. This paper describes the design and implementation of an architecture for access-controlled resource discovery. This system achieves this goal by integrating access control with the Intentional Naming System (INS), a resource discovery and service location system. The integration is scalable, efficient, and fits well within a proxy-based security framework designed for dynamic networks. We provide performance experiments that show how our solution outperforms existing schemes. The result is a system that provides secure, access-controlled resource discovery that can scale to large numbers of resources and users. Copyright c © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.