Keeping Up With Your Peers, Securely ICT Results (07/21/08)
as it appeared in the July 28, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
European researchers have built a platform that can be used to develop secure, mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) applications for specific industry needs. With secure P2P, users will not have to go through a central communications hub to connect and work together. The European Union-funded PEPERS project developed the platform on mobile devices based on the open-source Symbian operating system for mobile use. "And developing software that responded to all the security constraints was tough, too," says PEPERS project coordinator Vasilios Tountopoulos. "We had the rules in place, but then you need to adapt those rules to a specific situation." The PEPERS researchers addressed the issue by isolating the P2P application from the rest of the host operating system, which improved security, and they also faced certain business constraints. The team used the platform to develop a P2P application that would allow reporters to collaborate on breaking news and another that would allow security guards to coordinate a response to a situation without the use of a central dispatch. Click Here to View Full Article
