Protecting Broker-Less Subscribe or Publish Systems through Identity-Based Encryption

Abstract

The provisioning of basic security mechanisms such as authentication and confidentiality is highly challenging in a content based publish/subscribe system. Authentication of publishers and subscribers is difficult to achieve due to the loose coupling of publishers and subscribers. Likewise, confidentiality of events and subscriptions conflicts with content-based routing. This paper presents a novel approach to provide confidentiality and authentications in a broker-less content-based publish/subscribe system. The authentication of publishers and subscribers as well as confidentiality of events is ensured, by adapting the pairing-based cryptography mechanisms, to the needs of a publish/subscribe system. Furthermore, an algorithm to cluster subscribers according to their subscriptions preserves a weak notion of subscription confidentiality.