User Authentication in Virtual Home Environment

Virtual Home Environment (VHE) lets users use the same set of selected services and a personal customized user interface when roaming in other networks or using different terminals. Authentication of the user and service providers is important as access to user profiles has to be tightly controlled. There are different methods for user authentication, in mobile systems a token/password combination is traditionally used. The paper presents a proposed VHE architecture built with agent technology. Other current work and ongoing VHE projects is also presented. Analysis is performed on the example architecture and other implementation proposals. Conclusions are then presented stating that security and authentication is generally not well thought of in prototype implementations and candidate architectures.