A Secure Context-aware Content Sharing Kiosk for Mobile Devices in Low-Resourced Environments

Despite the explosion of mobile subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is still a challenge of delivering the appropriate content to the users taking into account of various Internet connectivity constraints and emerging security requirements. Although technologies for information sharing are steadily growing, the communication infrastructure that provides the backbone of third or fourth generation connectivity requires a lot of capital and is often limited by geographical coverage. Motivated by these challenges and constraints, this paper presents a design of the Secure Context-aware Content Sharing Kiosk, an enhancement to the previous Content Sharing Kiosk approaches with support for secure online and offline content distribution and sharing. A hybrid of a role and lease-based security and privacy model was embedded in the design to control distribution of information across different recipients. The lease-based security and privacy model combines the strengths of the role-based security and privacy models by allowing mobile content users to have control over the content sharing through pre-defined conditions of content leasing. Such conditions include time and location thereby enabling users able to lease out information to other users on the network. Upon expiry or violation, the leased information expires. In order to renew access to such information, users are able to request for the renewal of the lease from the content owner. The designed Kiosk was validated using a case study for content sharing in a hospital setting. The research results of this paper, contributes new knowledge in the line of design and development, and can be re-used in other settings with minimal customization, including remote regions with intermittent Internet coverage.