SECURE MIDDLEWARE FOR EMBEDDED P2P SYSTEMS
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Welcome to SMEPP Web Page
 
Embedded Peer-to-Peer Systems represent a new challenge in the development of software for distributed systems. These systems have brought about an important revolution in distributed computing paradigms, now that the roles of client and server, which are the basis of the most widely used distributed computation models, are disappearing. The new scenario consists of systems in which all the elements of the network are symmetrical and in most cases, the mechanisms of communication are not based on pre-existing infrastructures, but rather on dynamic ad-hoc networks among peers. At the same time, the recent technological advances in short distance wireless communications have opened up new areas of application which represent important technological challenge. In addition, these systems are extremely vulnerable against any type of internal or external attacks. One of the key factors in the success of these systems is the possibility of abstracting all these problems by means of convenient middleware. This middleware should hide the complexity of the underlying infrastructure while providing open interfaces to third parties for application development.

     
   
  
Objectives

The main objective of this project is to develop a new middleware, based on a new network centric abstract model, specially designed for the above described scenario, and trying to overcome the main problems of the currently existing domain specific middleware proposals. The middleware will be secure, generic and highly customizable, allowing for its adaptation to different devices (from PDAs and new generation mobile phones to embedded sensor actuator systems) and domains (from critical systems to consumer entertainment or communication). Its suitability will be demonstrated by the development of two different innovative real-life applications.

Expected Results

 

SMEPP will produce a generic middleware for embedded peer to peer systems that will implement new security primitives for the specific attacks in this type of systems.

A new specific interaction model specific for peer to peer interactions will be defined. The middleware will implement the necessary services to support this interaction model.

Together with the middleware infrastructure, customizable a component framework will be developed. This framework will provide the tools necessary to adapt the middleware infrastructure to different embedded devices and networks.

Two validation applications will be developed: one in the field of environmental monitoring of industrial plants and in mobile telephony and context aware computing. These applications will be used to obtain the main requisites of the middleware and will help to demonstrate the suitability of the new middleware for the development of applications for this type of environments. The applications domains are different enough to study the flexibility and adaptability of the middleware and its associat tools.