presence of adversaries. We’re going to go into considerably more detail about the concept of identity in the next section, but for the moment let’s just assume that if two parties share a secret, then if they can convey proof to the other party of the fact that they possess the secret then they’ve effectively identified themselves to the other party. So, what does a protocol look like that can accomplish this?

Well, in fact there are a plethora of protocols available through which two or more parties can authenticate their identities to each other over channels monitored by adversaries. In their book, Protocols for Authentication and Key Establishment, Colin Boyd and Anish Mathuria provide detailed specifications for a large collection of such procedures. Most have a common theme to them. One assumes that a secret shared between two parties is actually a key to an encryption algorithm. One party can send an arbitrary message to the other party and say “encrypt this.” It doesn’t matter if an adversary can see the message because the original sending party is going to take the response message and pass it through the known encryption algorithm with its copy of the secret key. If the original message comes out of the algorithm processing then the first party knows that the second party has the same key. The first party has identified the second party. If the two parties now do this same set of operations in reverse, then the second party can identify the first party. All this is known as a mutual authentication protocol. The knowledge of such protocols, that is the software to effect them on a transcendent personal device, is an artifact of its safety and security needs and those of its bearer.

Humans have five basic senses, and their entire cognitive perception of the world around them is defined by the input from those five classes of sensors. The sensors themselves are an aspect of the basic anatomy and physiology of the human body. The interpretation of the sensor signals occurs at many levels within the mind; levels that we tend to classify according the hierarchy of needs. A sudden, sharp pain in the foot might trigger a virtually instantaneous reaction when the autonomic nervous system seeks to simply move the foot away from the perceived source of the pain. If that pain has a more gradual onset, when finally noticed it might trigger a more thoughtful response involving taking off one’s shoe to remove the nail in its sole. If the pain is similar, but perhaps more chronic than acute, we might actually make an aesthetic based decision to live with it because it’s caused by a fashionable, although new and unbroken-in pair of shoes. So it is with the sensors present within the body and trusted core of the transcendent personal device.

We discussed a variety of such sensors in Chapter 7. Applications at the safety and security tasking level should seek to identify known threats based on the signature responses from the sensors. This would include interrogation of sensors to determine whether changes have occurred in the anatomical makeup of the transcendent personal device body. It includes analysis of power filters within the trusted core agent to confirm that power levels and frequencies have not been altered in an attempt to manipulate processing within the trusted core agent.

Physiological Needs

Driven by the biophysical structure of living organisms, the most basic needs of the individual are characterized by the elements or facilities necessary to support physiological processes. In the case of the human species and using the emergence of the vertebrates as a starting point, the evolution of such processes ultimately gave rise to the hierarchy of needs. In our emergent description of the transcendent personal device, we have thus far considered a variety of characteristics that derive from the higher order needs of the individual person as well as of the device itself. Forming the base level of the needs hierarchy, we must finally consider extensions to

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