Security and Privacy for Publish-Subscribe Systems

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Modern distributed applications have sparked a growth of interest in "publish-subscribe" technologies, where the flow of information is determined by interest on the part of the receiver rather than by explicit addressing. While its rich communication model and dynamic addressing show great potential as a platform for selective information dissemination, the security aspects of publish-subscribe are not well understood. This work proposes to research and develop a security architecture for publish-subscribe systems, particularly to minimize the degree to which the publish-subscribe infrastructure must be trusted. The proposed research will also address the impact of security on system scalability, a typical goal of pub-sub systems. In addition to the design of a security architecture, this research will include a foundational characterization of security goals for such systems and simulations of security architectures that result from this study.