2006 Reports

A Survey of Security Issues and Solutions in Presence

Singh, Vishal; Schulzrinne, Henning G.

With the growth of presence based services, it is important to securely manage and distribute sensitive presence information such as user location. We survey techniques that are used for security and privacy of presence information. In particular, we describe the SIMPLE based presence specific authentication, integrity and confidentiality. We also discuss the IETF's common policy for geo-privacy, presence authorization for presence information privacy and distribution of different levels of presence information to different watchers. Additionally, we describe an open problem of getting the aggregated presence from the trusted server without the server knowing the presence information, and propose a solution. Finally, we discuss denial of service attacks on the presence system and ways to mitigate them.