Mike Reiter
Carnegie-Mellon University

Abstract

Inheriting the vast mobile phone market, converged mobile devices ("smartphones") are poised to become the first pervasive personal computing platform. Several research groups and companies are already exploring a vision of the smartphone as a universal access control device, replacing physical keys, access tokens, etc. In this talk we describe our flavor of this vision, with a focus on the new types of flexible policy management and authority delegation that such devices would enable, and summarize our efforts to address some of the primary obstacles to this vision. To date, these efforts have yielded advances in areas as diverse as cryptographic techniques to defend captured smartphones from misuse; automated theorem proving in support of a proof-carrying access control infrastructure; and user interfaces for security management. We also describe our efforts to deploy this technology in a testbed on the Carnegie Mellon campus.

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