Providing basic security mechanisms in broker-less publish/subscribe systems
Muhammad Adnan Tariq, Boris Koldehofe, Ala Altaweel, Kurt Rothermel · 2010
The provisioning of basic security mechanisms such as authentication and confidentiality is highly challenging in a content-based publish/subscribe system. Authentication of publishers and subscribers is difficult to achieve due to the loose coupling of publishers and subscribers. Similarly, confidentiality of events and subscriptions conflicts with content-based routing. In particular, content-based approaches in broker-less environments do not address confidentiality at all. This paper presents a novel approach to provide confidentiality and authentication in a broker-less content-based publish-subscribe system. The authentication of publishers and subscribers as well as confidentiality of events is ensured, by adapting the pairing-based cryptography mechanisms, to the needs of a publish/subscribe system. Furthermore, an algorithm to cluster subscribers according to their subscriptions preserves a weak notion of subscription confidentiality. Our approach provides fine grained key management and the cost for encryption, decryption and routing is in the order of subscribed attributes. Moreover, the simulation results verify that supporting security is affordable with respect to the cost for overlay construction and event dissemination latencies, thus preserving scalability of the system.