MS A Mobile Systems Architecture Group - Security Research Team -

Fair Integrated Data Exchange Services (FIDES) Project

The perceived lack of Internet security is one of the greatest inhibitors to the expansion of e-commerce. Although a number of security protocols and mechanisms have found their way into e-commerce activities, they can only offer a limited level of security protection for e-commerce transactions such as certified delivery of e-goods, contract signing and valuable business data exchange for which non-repudiation of receipt and fair data exchange security services are required. The mission of the FIDES project (http://www.dti-mi.org.uk/newweb/fides.htm) is to address the security services of user authentication, access control, non-repudiation and fairness to support secure and end-to-end B2B transactions. The research involves architectural and protocol designs to provide these security services and their incorporation into the existing middleware product - OpenFusion, which is a set of integrated CORBA and J2EE services.

Secure E-Banking and Mobile Agent Security

Computer-related financial abuse, fraud and forgery are not only serious threats to the reputation of organisations/institutions and confidence of consumers/individuals in them, but also could cause negative economic consequences to those affected. Our work in this context is to research, design and prototype an automated real-time security solution for the prevention and detection of trust abuse and fraudulent behaviours incurred in monetary e-transactions/trading during human intervention by authorised insiders (i.e. employees) of an organisation. Typical organisations to be targeted by the work are banks. Mobile agent (MA) technology has emerged as a promising paradigm for computing, in particular for building ubiquitous computing environments and for emerging m-commerce and managing networked and distributed systems/applications, owing to the properties of autonomy, mobility and asynchrony of software agents. However, security concerns are the main obstacles to the full deployment of the MA technology. The research activities in this area include the design of cryptographic primitives and protocols to facilitate secure authentication of agents to hosts, protection of sensitive data carried by agents and reliable delegation of trusts to agents.

Secure Network Communications and QoS Provision

With nearly 300 million mobile users worldwide and the emergence of m-commerce, it is apparent that mobile users should enjoy the same level of security services as their wired counterpart. Our work in this area concentrates on the design of end-to-end security solutions to facilitate secure communication and m-commerce in an environment consisted of wireless access network and wired backbone. The current research topics include end-to-end authentication service, end-to-end accountable anonymity service, and end-to-end QoS provisioning.

Designed by Aleksandra Nenadic