Security Provisioning in Pervasive Environments Using Multi-Objective Optimization

Pervasive computing applications involve information flow across multiple organizations. Thus, any security breach in an application can have far-reaching consequences. However, effective security mechanisms can be quite different from those typically deployed in conventional applications since these mechanisms are constrained by various factors in a pervasive environment. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology to perform a cost-benefit analysis under such circumstances. The approach is based on the formulation of a set of constrained multi-objective optimization problems to minimize the residual damage and the cost of security provisioning.