Trust as Differentiator for Value-Adding Home Service Providers

Abstract

The openness of OSGi home service delivery platforms enables a service provider to deploy new services which aggregate services from other providers. Without security measures, each service provider is able to probe the home network, modify the configurations of other services, and (ab)use these services in favor of their own services. Premium service providers however prefer to protect their value-added services in an attempt to differentiate with low-cost or free Internet-based service providers. The common home technologies however lack fine-grained security support and do not allow to configure trust-based service adaptation. In this paper, we propose an intelligent residential gateway, with three security components that facilitate trust-based service adaptation in a multi provider environment. Using XACML policies, the collaboration between service components can remotely be modified. Legacy services can be protected and collaboration of services can be made dependent on the outcome of any other service. We compare OSGi virtualisation, embedded OSGi security and security-as-a-service. The latter allows for fine-grained access control on method-level. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we evaluate the performance overhead of transparent service authentication and three policy administration approaches. The results illustrate a minimal overhead to add trust-based service collaboration to any(legacy) service.