Personal servers as digital keys

Personal servers are an attractive concept: people carry around a device that takes care of computing, storage and communication on their behalf in a pervasive computing environment. So far personal servers have mainly been considered for accessing personal information. In this paper, we consider personal servers in the context of a digital key system. Digital keys are an interesting alternative to physical keys for mail or good delivery companies whose employees access tens of private buildings every day. We present a digital key system tailored for the current incarnation of personal servers, i.e., a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. We describe how to use Bluetooth for this application, we present a simple authentication protocol and we provide a detailed analysis of response time and energy consumption on the mobile phone.