MobiPass: a passport for mobile business

While pervasive computing provides a potentially vast business opportunity for many industry participants, it also carries challenges along with it. In this paper, a passport-based architecture has been proposed to convert this unpredictable, highly dynamic pervasive environment into a trusted business platform. It utilizes the widely accepted passport concept here named MobiPass to evaluate and classify the potential mobile entities into a trustworthy form. It allows fine-grained access control without necessarily having had prior interaction with or knowledge of other parties and environments by setting customized rules against a MobiPolicy. A detailed case study has been introduced to demonstrate how the MobiPass architecture can help customers and retailers to build a strong trusted connection and how the shopping experience can be enriched and efficiency improved.