Robert Maier

Security in mobile environments

The purpose of this research project is to deal with security aspects introduced by mobility in existing environments. Also, new environments, designed with mobility requirements are to be considered.

Research directions:

• Security policies in Personal Area Networks. PANs are a new mobile environment developed by introducing mobility into networking and reducing the operating space of the network to the personal space of the user. Security aspects introduced by these new elements are to be addressed.
• Scalability of existing protocols when mobility is an issue. The world is moving towards a heterogeneous computing and communications infrastructure where each device is going to be more or less mobile. This mobility implies certain problems from a security point of view. Protocols used in LANs (Local Area Networks) or WANs (Wide Area Networks) are not scalable to a PAN (Personal Area Network) for example, where all the users are mobile and the configuration is dynamic. This kind of networking, ad-hoc networking needs more mechanisms to ensure security.

Supervisors:
Prof.Dr. Bart Preneel (KU Leuven).
Prof.Dr. Joos Vandewalle (KU Leuven).