Efficient and secure device clustering for networked home domains

Abstract

Virtual private community (VPC) architecture efficiently and securely creates personal domains to share content only in the networked domains without external authentication/proxy systems. For that, a secure device clustering method consisting of a device identification and membership management system is required. However, existing certificate chain based association (CCA) scheme for VPC, one of device clustering schemes, has two unsolved problems. First, since it does not verify who is an original creator of a VPC domain, it makes VPC vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Second, it does not consider how to restrain revoked members from accessing VPC domains, which causes malicious users to illegally access VPC domains. Hence, to solve such problems, this paper proposes a member list chain and reputation based association (MLC-RbA) scheme, and then evaluates the performance/security of MLC-R b A to prove that MLC-R b A provides better reliability1.