The All-or-Nothing Anti-Theft Policy--Theft Protection for Pervasive Computing

In many application scenarios for pervasive computing, theft is a serious security threat. In this paper we present the all-or-nothing anti-theft policy aimed at providing theft protection for pervasive computing. The overall idea behind the all-or-nothing anti-theft policy is to chain devices together in friendly networks so that any device will only work when it can see all of its friends. Thus a thief will have to keep the network of friendly devices together even if he only desires to steal one of the devices. Otherwise the device will not work. We provide a detailed security policy, present the required cryptographic protocols, provide three different applications, and finally we document that the policy is suitable for implementation on typical pervasive computing devices.