A trustworthy framework for impromptu service discovery with mobile devices

Wireless hotspots are permeating our workplace, home and public places bringing interesting services and spontaneous connectivity to mobile users. While it's ideal to enable the mobile clients to discover services automatically with the device-to-hand across the augmented physical spaces, it's equally important to guarantee the security and privacy of the mobile clients and service providers. In this paper, we propose a trustworthy framework that can support impromptu service discovery with mobile devices in WLAN enabled environments. Different from the existing service discovery approaches, the framework requires no specialized hardware or software installation in mobile client devices, it can preserve the privacy of mobile users during the authentication process by not requesting their identities. We prototyped a set of assistive services in a shopping mall which can be spontaneously discovered and accessed by a disabled person from his WLAN enabled mobile device, we show how both the security and privacy are achieved in a unified manner using trusted computing platforms.