Multilateral Security in Mobile Applications and Location Based Services

Due to the many current weaknesses of security mechanisms in mobile technology, location based services essentially depend on security aware middleware and reliable multilateral security concepts. Neither the latest operating systems of mobile devices nor current concepts in wireless communication GPRS, WLAN, or Bluetooth meet the security requirements needed to establish sustainable trust between consumers and producers. This paper presents an approach for multilateral secure mobile applications which is based on mobile agent technology. We use mobile agents as highly dynamic deployment mechanisms for service components. Our approach allows us to enforce fine-granular multilateral security policies for all involved participants: service distributors, service providers, and users accessing the service. Our work is applied to the MOBILE project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.