The context of nomadic smart communication devices organized in numerous interconnected spontaneous networks induces new security challenges that cannot be resolved only by cryptographic methods and protocols.
Research and development in security fields are within the general framework of smart nomadic communication devices. The cryptography work concentrates on the design and implementation of compact, fast, low-power, and user-friendly architectures for deployment in highly constrained architectures such as communicating sensors, smart tags and other portable low cost intelligent devices.
Especially, we address the design of new primitives such as Message Authentication Codes, block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash functions for highly constraint architectures. In parallel, we also study, evaluate and design advanced protocols and security infrastructures for better integration with some facets of society, e.g. legal aspect and privacy, and interactions with inherently untrustworthy environment in the context of ambient networks. A trust management architecture based on history of interactions has been proposed for nomadic autono- mous devices combining elliptic curves cryptographic methods and risk management models.
Some important results have also been obtained in the context of security monitoring of large scale systems with user behaviour modelling and anomaly detection. An ontology for security information have been developed and used to hide the heterogeneity of hundreds of monitoring systems on real data obtained during a collaboration with a security software company (Exaprotect). In the middleware context, we also study the impact of security architecture both in terms of strength and resources consumption, for example in a secure software component deployment process.