Security Challenges of Location-Aware Mobile Business

Abstract

In addition to mobility, the ability of context awareness and especially location awareness has greatly enhanced the opportunities of mobile businesses. Many different kinds of context-aware services ranging from "finding nearby restaurants" to "sending ambulances to people in emergency" have already taken their places in the business. Besides availability and quality of the service, the user acceptance and therefore the economic success of mobile business applications fundamentally depend on a robust and easy-to-use security architecture meeting the users' needs for privacy, anonymity, confidential communication and secure payment schemes. Based on a generic framework that is able to execute arbitrary context-aware services, we analyse the security challenges in mobile business with special focus on location as a context property and provide directions towards possible solutions