ABSTRACT
THEME This last chapter on contextual-based processing looks at a critical issue in global contextual processing: how the information in a context is secured. To understand the proposed model, we discuss the nature of the methods currently used in security and the nature of security on the Internet. The Internet, being essentially a flat peer-based model, has little security, yet contexts that are of a global nature either physically or logically and hyperdistributed need some methods for determination of confidence in the accuracy of contextual information before it is consumed. A new geometrically based mathematical method for reasoning about levels of security requirements is proposed through the application and development of a brane. Branes can be utilized to integrate the four dimensions of contexts-time, space, similarity, and impact-into a model for determination of security requirements required for a context. This is unified with the concept of spot security as a way to reason about the level of security that might be required for a context and the relationship of security to that of confidence in utilization of the context’s information. This model
is intuitive in application and provides a metric upon which current security methods can be applied without throwing out existing techniques or reinvention of current methods utilized in security.
