Dissertation in the field of Networking Technology, Yki Kortesniemi

The title of thesis is Access Control in Distributed Systems using SPKI Authorisation Certificates

In distributed systems, the ability to effectively manage access to a large number of resources can be challenging. The situation becomes even more difficult, when there are limited computational resources or network availability to implement the access control solution. Examples are Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as the many internet-connected devices at home. To make them easy to use, there has to exist a relatively simple way to manage the large number of devices and to, e.g., grant temporary access to some of them for a visiting friend. In this dissertation, I examine how the problem can be overcome with the Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI), which expresses access rights as cryptographically signed authorisation certificates. I approach the issue from several angles.

Opponent: Professor Valtteri Niemi, University of Helsinki, Finland

Supervisor: Professor Jukka Manner Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Communications and Networking