Security considerations on pervasive real-time collaboration

A real-time pervasive collaboration system enables people to work together on a certain task at anytime and from anyplace. Security is one of the primary concerns for these systems, when running over public networks. In particular, end-to-end security represents a crucial issue in pervasive collaboration environments due to the heterogeneity of the networks and devices used. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of security measures at the diverse protocol layers to shielding pervasive real-time collaboration systems, and propose a security framework residing at the application layer to secure pervasive collaborations.