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Abstract: Ubiquitous computing is revolutionizing the way humans interact with machines and carry out everyday tasks. It extends everyday computing into the physical world, creating computationally smart environments that feature seamless interactions and automation. As a result of the highly distributed nature of ubiquitous computing, it is essential to develop security mechanisms that lend themselves well to the delicate properties of smart ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware access control mechanism that utilizes threshold cryptography and multilayer encryption to provide a dynamic and truly distributed method for access control. We simulate our access control scheme and show that access control decisions can be made in a timely manner even as we increase key and file sizes. This mechanism is closely coupled with the context-capturing services and security policy service resulting in a fully context-aware and seamless access control mechanism for typical ubiquitous computing scenarios. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Smart environments should protect sensitive information from exposure or monitoring. • A lightweight cyber security framework with context-awareness for pervasive computing environment is proposed. • Symmetric key encryption leverages the data confidentiality and digital signature-based hash function ensures the integrity. • Implementation of the proposed framework is performed in a real cloud environment. • Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Internet of things (IoT) plays a key role in enabling smart sustainable cities. Pervasive computing over the IoT platform makes life more convenient by embedding sensors based on context-aware computing devices in the physical environment for the ubiquitous availability of computing resources. The sensors gather contextual information from the physical world and transmit it to receivers as per requirements or in case of environmental changes, such as temperature and humidity. However, the combination of dynamic operation and the need to handle sensitive and private data make the pervasive computing environment and IoT devices vulnerable to numerous attacks. Smart environments require a maximum level of safety assurance, such as trusted context producers and customers, which should protect sensitive information from exposure or monitoring. This paper discusses the major cyber threats in smart environments and proposes a novel lightweight security framework that authenticates and maintains the context providers and receivers. The cloud environment is adopted for user authentication at the user layer to implement access control and role assignment. Finally, the proposed security framework is implemented in the IBM cloud platform with six devices to evaluate its efficiency, sustainability, and secure communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the guidelines and open issues in systems support for ubiquitous computing (Ubisys) workshops in 2003 and 2004. The enjoyable features of the systems has been the freeform small group and plenary discussion sessions. In 2005, graceful degradation and self-configuration of systems were discussed. Existing supporting infrastructures often make unreasonable assumptions about the degree to which the location, context and users of devices involved in typical Ubicomp application scenarios are known in the system.

This paper investigates the ant colony optimization (ACO) based routing protocol against holes (or voids) to address user’s connectivity via Pervasive Wireless Sensor Networks (PWSNs). A hole is an area that has no active sensors, which makes a connection between one side of the network and the other side impossible. To avoid such holes, prior works detected them only when packets reached nodes near the hole, called dead-ends. In this case, the packets need to be rerouted, which results in additional communication cost. The ant colony optimization (ACO) approach is known to be suitable for dynamic environments, which makes it a good choice to deal with the hole problem. We study the capability of an ACO-based routing protocol, called the biologically inspired secure autonomous routing protocol (BIOSARP), for resolving this issue. Because of its routing criteria, BIOSARP does not try to detect the holes after their appearance, but rather avoids them. Network simulator 2 (ns-2) is utilized to perform an analysis by adopting a flag-based feedback mechanism in BIOSARP and is further compared with on-demand routing with the void avoidance (ODVA) protocol in terms of the delivery ratio and energy consumption. Findings clearly demonstrate that BIOSARP can efficiently maintain the network prior to any possible hole problems, by switching data forwarding to the most optimal neighboring node. Thus, it can self-adapt to faults appearing in PWSN and efficiently maintains the network communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]