An Authentication Scheme for Ubiquitous Commerce: A Cognitive Agents Based Approach

Ubiquitous commerce services are the emerging area in ubiquitous computing. A ubiquitous commerce is a service requested according to the customers personal profile which typically include individual preferences, keeping the technical constraints of mobile device in use and the context of operating environment. An important issue of authentication in ubiquitous commerce platform is, "how does it determine who the mobile customer is, if requests are allowed to come in from various communication channels, devices, and contexts." We propose a transaction-based authentication scheme for ubiquitous commerce service using cognitive agents. The proposed approach of authentication is made less-intrusive to customer by, dynamically deploying authentication challenges based on three factors: ubiquitous commerce transaction sensitivity, context sensitivity, and beliefs on customer behaviors. The method has been simulated with a typical ubiquitous commerce application over in-house established wireless testbed, the results are time efficient and quite encouraging.