An Ownership Model and a Security Policy Definition Language to Security Bootstrap Ad-hoc Distributed Systems

We believe that the critical aspect in providing security for pervasive environments is building security and trust relations between devices without requiring the users to be experts. In this tech-note we present two complementary mechanisms to bootstrap security relations between networked devices: the ownership model and a security policy definition language. The ownership model assures security relations between devices owned by the same user, and the security policy language defines security relations to other devices, assigns rights to relations, and supports authentic key exchange.