Morse Reseach group

SMEPP (Secure Middleware for Embedded peer to peer Systems)

Embedded Peer-to-Peer Systems represent a new challenge in the development of software for distributed systems. These systems have brought about an important revolution in distributed computing paradigms, now that the roles of client and server, which are the basis of the most widely used distributed computation models, are disappearing. The new scenario consists of systems in which all the elements of the network are symmetrical and in most cases, the mechanisms of communication are not based on pre-existing infrastructures, but rather on dynamic ad-hoc networks among peers. At the same time, the recent technological advances in short distance wireless communications have opened up new areas of application which represent an important technological challenge. In addition, these systems are extremely vulnerable against any type of internal or external attacks. One of the key factors in the success of these systems is the possibility of abstracting all these problems by means of convenient middleware. This middleware should hide the complexity of the underlying infrastructure while providing open interfaces to third parties for application development.